The Empire Stories

by Eduard Tubin

The Fire Nation won the War and has become a great space faring Empire. The Earth has not fared as well and Azula's descendants find it destroyed by nuclear war. Carly's and her friends are survivors who make contact with the Fire Nation.

Title: The Empire Stories
Category: Cartoons » Avatar: Last Airbender
Author: Eduard Tubin
Language: English, Rating: Rated: K+
Genre: General
Published: 09-20-11, Updated: 02-22-12
Chapters: 6, Words: 56,714

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Chapter 1: Chapter 1

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The Empire of the Fire Nation

Chapter 1: Contact

The Fire Nation had a problem. It had prevailed in the Great War but for entirely unforeseen reasons. At first, the Fire Nation revelled in their victories over the other nations but the joy of victory wore off in the succeeding years. Princess Azula had gone insane. Fire Lord Ozai had his bending removed by the Avatar but in the attempt, the Avatar line was destroyed utterly. Bending vanished from the world. The Fire Nation had conquered the other nations and their denizens feared chaos and anarchy and accepted Fire Nation rule. Fire Lord Ozai survived but died of his injuries shortly thereafter. Fire Lord Ozai left no suitable heir. Princess Azula had recovered her wits over the years but not enough for the nobles to trust her with power. Prince Zuko had managed to evade his father and survived a bitter and disillusioned man with a moral conscience.

Under normal circumstances, having a moral conscience would disqualify him for service as the Fire Lord over the Empire of the Fire Nation but the nobles placed him on the throne. They told him the kinds of lies he wished to hear. They freed Lady Mai and granted Lady Ursa her freedom. In order to occupy Fire Lord Zuko; the noble houses distracted him with the regular sort of problems to do with the economy and social injustice. Fire Lord Zuko ruled a battered world, divided and conquered, wholly unprepared for the future.

The powerful nobles of the great Empire of the Fire Nation decided a space program would keep the Fire Lord nicely distracted. They had Earth Kingdom scientists from the University of Ba Sing Se and asked Zuko for money to freeze dry a chimp in space using some kind of rocket. Zuko figured given all the problems with the economy, the riots of the youth, unemployed men in the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe petitioners demanding subsidies for heat for their poor that perhaps accomplishing a complicated technological feat such as freeze drying a lemur in space would distract everyone.

This story will not explore any of those histories of that period in any detail.

This story will not explain the realm lost the ability to use bending after the death of Avatar Aang after he destroyed himself while trying to remove Ozai's bending.

The lemur died but set off a technological cascade that saw the Empire of the Fire Nation unify their world under one world government. That poor lemur had a great effect on history. Fire Lord Zuko died at a three digit age having left the planet with all of the amenities of technological civilization.

Two dozen centuries later, the Royal Yacht the Crimson Dragon emerged from the mysterious depths of hyperspace at a point about a light day from a rather ordinary star called by them KH 113 or called by the humans living on the third planet – theirs. The Empire of the Fire Nation or the Kaitanni (as they preferred to be called) had emerged as a technologically advanced race capable of interstellar flight. The Humans had emerged as a bit of a problem. The Empire decided to send a few ships with the descendants of the Royal Family of Azula and Zuko to that remote region of space to have a look.

The Humans caused the Empire the following problem: the Empire had come to regard the KH 113 system as part of their imperial realm. They had never showed any interest in it before but now they wanted to assert their claim to the system. They feared an upstart race might eat away at their territory. They left the less advanced races in the territory they staked out alone. This might seem enlightened but the Kaitanni had a deeply held belief in their own cultural superiority and wanted nothing to do with races that lacked even basic steam power. They feared the humans because the humans had advanced so quickly and other advanced races might not be above giving the humans a step up.

The Kaitanni came to assert their presence and to make certain the humans had not made contact with any other race.

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The Crimson Dragon came out of hyperspace in the midst of arcing blue energy from hyperspace that dissipated slowly over several minutes. The ship looked like a long, angular manta ray painted a mother of pearl bluish white with bright scarlet detailing. The back of the ship had a long tail that made it over two kilometers long with a complement of a thousand souls. The crew consisted of scientists and various specialists as well as the command crew and two members of royalty.

In spite of its great size, in the scale of the Solar System it was insignificant. The two members of royalty didn't have much significance to the mission but had come along to act as sponsors – give the whole enterprise a look of respectability and because this yacht belonged to their family.

As soon as the energy of the jump engines dissipated, scientists and technicians swarmed over consoles, and every communication dish, sensor array and camera trained itself on a small, rocky, wet world third out from its star. The ship had come to find out more about the Humans or the Hominids as they termed them. The Kaitanni had found them on the edge of the space they had staked out as theirs; eking out a medieval existence on their planet oblivious to their watchers. When discovered, the Kaitanni found dirty, diseased peasants and a people with no clue their Earth wasn't at all the center of all things. The Humans had made rapid progress. The Kaitanni Royal Houses had gone from viewing them as a quaint band of feudal farmers to an up an coming concern – an Emerging Race – one of their economists had termed them. They had gone from a silent world lit by fires to a chatty world that beamed out radio beams in every direction. The Humans merited a closer look and the Crimson Dragon had come to take one.

This time the scientists heard almost nothing on the radio bands. No data, no television, not a single cheerful disc jockey announcing traffic jams or train delays. The Humans had turned their planet into the radio transmitter equivalent of a flood lamp: but it had gone suddenly and mysteriously dark as if the bulb had burned out.

Princess Azula could trace her lineage as far back as the Fire Lords during the War of Unification but the Kaitanni tinkered with her genetics and gave her brain implants to lengthen her life and allow her to better interface with artificial intelligence. She had none of the madness of her historical namesake nor did she have the ambition. She had great intelligence and had won acclaim as a promising intellect but she was safe and reliable. She liked the botanical gardens and spent much of the long six month trip reading off a tablet computer while sitting in the gardens enjoying the feel of living plants around her. She had come as the representative of her people but as a young princess of twenty years; she had less than an intimidating presence. She wore the traditional gold hairpin and the red and black vest with gold trim but to a human; she appeared petite and harmless.

Her aide Karo Zhao looked completely harmless and in all respects; he was. He wore the same uniform but he couldn't quite pull off the confident and strong stride. He walked almost apologetically as he strode into the botanical gardens and the heavy door slid aside. He had done his research and knew that humans stood a full head taller than most of his race and had a rather gory history full of wars and brutality. He held a tablet computer and found himself stumbling toward the princess as he tripped on a tree root that had lifted up a grate in the floor of the gardens.

"Yes?" Azula stared at the roof of the gardens and the huge lights that gave daylight to the native species of plants and trees that lived there.

"We came out of hyperspace," Karo ran his small palmtop computer over the black cloth of his vest in an effort to dust off the screen. Despite his insecurity, Azula liked him and had selected him for his honesty and his delightful discomfort. Karo proved that even a person with a cybernetic brain could have quirks and a personality. Cyborgs had this trait and Azula could never figure out whether the often fussy and nervous personalities of cyborgs came from bugs in programming, the fractal nature of optical and quantum based computers, a blend of both or something much more mundane such as plain neuroses.

Karo Zhao had a well placed family but he had an artificial brain and perhaps didn't feel equal to everyone else. Legends told of powerful ancients who could bend the elements. In this sophisticated age, no one really believed any of it but they could not explain how some of their species had telepathic powers. Some could move objects at a distance, others could see the future while others could read minds and such powers ran in families. Karo had demonstrated powerful ability to read minds in early infancy which meant his family had three choices. They could hide him forever on their estate since no psychic could ever appear in public without facing prison. They could turn him over to the Army Corps of Psychics for his entire life where they would train him as a soldier. They chose the third option – the transfer of his brain to an artificial cybernetic one. This removed the psychic traits but would leave him as an intact person or so the doctors claimed.

Karo's family fitted him with a cybernetic brain.

Azula sat on a bluewood bench made from a species of native tree that grew on the home world. She knew the tree as a tall cedar like tree with bright green needles and an odd camphor like smell that grew for hundreds of years or more and reached a hundred meters in height. The exotic blue bug proof wood made it a valued tree even if the furniture made from it never lost the smell of mothballs.

"You always turn up right on time." She nodded. "I know we came out of hyperspace for two reasons: I felt the shudder and you turned up." She looked up at her aide with impatience emanating from her amber eyes. "You look like you have something on your mind."

Karo stammered. "I have never left the home system before now as you know and..." Karo felt the heat and humidity of the garden which did nothing to help with his unease.

Azula raised her hand to silence her friend. "You won't die or become involved in a shooting war. Don't worry...we won't make direct contact. We won't land on the lawn of their palaces and ask them to allow us to meet their leaders. We came here to assert our presence to the other races – as we did in the days of old when we would send a few unfortunate soldiers to watch over the Southern Water Tribe and make sure it stayed under our control."

"Did we conquer that?" Karo ducked as a scarlet parrot with magenta tail feathers flew too close to his head. "I should ask if we should have bothered since most of that part of our planet now lies under a kilometer of ice?"

Azula took a little amusement in her aide's discomfort. "The people of the ancient times had different priorities and since the cold weather killed off lice; the Southern Water Tribe Kingdom may have had been a tour of duty with some good points."

"You have schooled me in sarcasm," Karo clasped his palm computer. "I still find myself unprepared for it."

"We have studied the humans and their planet for centuries." Azula told her friend. "We discovered them as peasant farmers eking out a living under feudal lords. They have come a long way and discovered radio and the computer. At some point, we'll have to make contact or they will stumble upon the uncomfortable truth that the Universe has other forms of intelligent life and contact us. This won't be that historic time and while the humans have made some progress they still have a primitive side. They still believe in free markets, eat ungulates and write love songs."

"Ew!" Karo paced the walkway in front of Azula clasping his tablet computer nervously behind his back. Karo wondered why the interior decorators had chosen some kind of hard wearing ugly black plastic boards to make the walkways in the botanical gardens. He knew the gardens were kept hot and humid and he didn't sweat very well. "You won't make me learn love songs?"

"You're heart wouldn't be in it."

Azula put her arm around her friend's neck. "We have plans to conduct a detailed survey; the most in depth study thus far. Our mission has the sponsorship of the highest knobs in the Royal Science Academy and much of the hyperbole that comes with this. So we'll fly a few scout ships and send probes to track the human planet." She walked with him out the door and into the brightly lit but mercifully cooler hallway. "You will add your talents to analyze the data and others will cloak all of our findings in pretty academic language so that the humans appeal as exotic if somewhat uncultured composers of love songs. Anthropologists will use this to make their profession sound important and then they'll have a final and clinching explanation for tattoos. We have only made limited contact by accident when our ships have crashed on the planet. We may do the same on this mission."

Karo felt more surefooted on the red carpet used in the hallways. He pondered the words limited contact as he walked along with Azula to a room called the Cartography Library. "Define limited contact."

"We land the ship in the backyard of some remote cabin inhabited by a mentally unstable fellow." Azula smiled wickedly. "We shine our spotlights on his house, draw him out and then land in front of his house."

"I take it you didn't run this plan by the captain."

"He'll find out when I bring you back to have the lead balls from a primitive fire arm removed from your head." Azula had no plans to do any of this but Karo could tell when most people were lying but couldn't tell when she was fibbing. After six months in hyperspace, this proved of some small amusement.

"Come we me – lets look at some maps." Azula invited.

The Cartography Library consisted of a touchscreen, a few controls, a stand that poked out into a circular space and a vast, immensely sophisticated holographic projection system networked into a sophisticated search engine that almost but never exactly got the search requests right. Karo and Azula stood up against the railing of the stand as Azula began entering commands into the touchscreen interface on her left. The room went dark as overhead lights concealed by triangular sconces overhead dimmed and a rainbow of flowing patternless blotches of color formed all around them.

"Earth!" Azula pointed as the holographic display showed the planet in perfect detail. "Earth as we knew it ten or so of our years ago. It has a milder climate than our home world. We have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and should be as warm as Earth but our planet is in the midst of a deep ice age – planets have their own quirks. About 6 billion humans live on the Earth. They descended from apes as far as we can tell. Our probes will use cloaking to gather more information on important sociological patterns, political developments and just generally snoop about in various orbits to gain a much clearer understanding of human society. We have sensors to receive radio and television broadcasts but that hardly tells us of the everyday lives of these humans. We may have nothing to worry about. The humans have proven quite prone to wars and have all the weapons of mass destruction and the fragile economic systems to bring their civilization to a grinding halt. They have worries about climate change, overpopulation, biodiversity, political instability and many other problems." Azula made the computer do a close flyover over the coast of California which showed Los Angeles in full detail. "If they destroy themselves or at least their civilization; we may have no need for diplomacy."

Karo watched downtown Los Angeles fly past in three dimensions as the hologram created a sophisticated illusion of flying low over the terrain. "Why did you drag me down here?"

"As per normal operating procedure - we sent a cloaked probe ahead of us," Azula tapped the tablet and the room shimmered and new edges resolved themselves into a background of stars and a single blue planet and a silver moon. "A week ago, it jumped into normal space near the Earth and the probe's mission proceeded quite normally until two days ago when it detected a small asteroid impact on the planet."

Karo watched the trail of light descend and strike a site off an unfamiliar coastline. "An unusual but not unexpected event." He commented when Azula stopped the motion as the mushroom cloud from the impact turned into a hideous white glare. "I imagine a grave loss of life and a series of temporary climatic changes but this system has a large number of dense asteroids that cross the orbits of the inner planets in this system; the humans could have spotted this one with their instruments."

"We thought the same thing when the probe recorded this event." She tapped the touch screen and the motion resumed but this time with the Earth in a false color image showing X-Ray radiation. A slight purple glow came from the radioactive elements of the planet.

"An asteroid impact doesn't give off X-Rays," Karo reminded Azula in the event she had tapped into the wrong program. An asteroid impact gave off huge amounts of heat as it transferred the kinetic energy of a million tons of iron and carbon into the crust of the planet but no ionizing radiation.

"Watch!" Azula demanded.

As Karo watched the time counter advanced from minutes to hours; he saw a series of white flashes over one region of the Earth. The time counter advanced and the first series repeated with a second that spread over a wider area and then by a third that looked like a series of camera flashes going off in a series over the entire surface of the planet viewable by the probe. Karo knew such flashes were going off around the whole planet.

Karo looked at Azula. "I don't get it. The Earth experienced a completely natural disaster – an asteroid impact – and the human race blew itself to oblivion with nuclear weapons?" Karo tapped the touch screen and reversed the time counter to view the asteroid as it approached Earth. "Such a small object would have hit with about two megatons of force. A local disaster with much loss of life but no act of war. I thought the humans had the capacity to spot such objects in space. How did the humans not see this coming?"

"We have no clue." Azula placed her hand on the railing and looked into the projection pit. "I have no doubt they could have picked it up but that doesn't mean they were looking out for it. They could have done many things that didn't happen. The asteroid struck, and the human race self destructed and we have no idea why."

"What about the radio traffic?" Karo asked hopefully, "Humans always chattered over the airwaves. This sector had grown quite cluttered with their radio traffic."

Azula tapped the railing cautiously. "We've heard the odd message but no commercial broadcasts like television networks and their computer data networks have gone dead." She watched Karo tap the touch screen and the image zoomed until he could see the details on the ground. The asteroid struck the ground and a huge flash of white light flooded over a large city and then faded away into a black and orange mushroom cloud. All the buildings beneath it had vanished and the ground for many kilometers along the coast had turned black. "We picked up simple broadcast networks probably set up for emergencies. They speak of an unprovoked attack on a state called Israel and its retaliation with its own weapons on another state called Iran. A few lone voices speak of some kind of war but are as confused as us. The planet has gone almost completely deaf and dumb."

Karo stopped the projectors and the room lights came back up. "The asteroid struck off the coast of a city called Haifa in the sea – the reason we see no crater."

"We had planned our jump beyond their solar system so they wouldn't detect us." Azula headed for the door which slid out of her way. "We have no reason to fear detection but to be certain, we will approach the Earth and orbit beyond the range of their moon."

---

"We will consider any information at this meeting," Captain Tsung said as he rose from a black, high back chair. "We have the facts. We don't know their meaning. This makes for a puzzle." He stroked a small goatee and spoke in those clipped, short sentences he used to emphasize his point. He had a dozen top scientists, the princess and Karo around a black and imposing square table used for meetings of grave importance. The stark grey walls added an extra element of imposing mass. Diffuse lighting meant that while one had more than enough light for reading, the room always appeared dark and sombre.

Azula looked around the meeting room and then nudged Karo who coughed nervously and then placed his palms on the table. "One odd thing about human culture I noticed as I looked at our files: monotheism."

Tsung had a thin, long and angry face that reminded Karo a bit of the watercolor portraits of the old Fire Lords. "I miss your meaning – uh Karo is it?"

"We have encountered dozens of races. They have religion. So do we but we choose to ignore it," Karo tried to ignore the confused looks of the others. They had more education than he did and he had trouble believing not one of them had not seen this pattern. "The Kaitanni were animists - we still pray to spirits, our ancestors or both. The Hakuri have any number of Gods – the number varies depending on how you count. Our anthropologists had to build a taxonomy to classify them all. The Earth had three main monotheistic religions and they all had the belief in the true and right nature of their cause. They have wars and endless conflicts in the very same region where the asteroid struck."

Doctor Han Chin looked at Karo.

"What has that to do with anything?" Chin made every attempt to make Karo appear small. He looked like a professor with a white moustache and a detached and at times abrupt personality. "The humans could tell the difference between a natural even like an asteroid and a nuclear blast."

"We assume humans think clearly at all times." Azula decided to rescue Karo as Karo had no confidence in himself but had that odd ability to sort facts into the right conclusions. "What if they reacted first and sent the bombs. Even once they understood the true nature of the event; they couldn't recall them. Those struck would strike back believing they had fallen under an unjust attack that killed millions of their citizens and by then it would be too late for anyone to stop a nuclear war. I remind the Good Doctor Chin that I brought Karo because his cybernetic brain could make sense of patterns in our motives better than we can. He has a certain objectivity conferred upon him by his own nature."

"I offered a suggestion," Karo continued. "I do not offer evidence."

The twelve scientists nodded halfheartedly. Karo had grown used to suspicion of his cybernetic nature. Chin examined him closely. Karo didn't dream. Karo had the brute force intelligence of any computer. Karo's brain worked many times faster than any natural one but took the same time to arrive at a conclusion or solve problems. Even Azula had implants that eroded her nature. She would not inherit the role of Fire Lord: she was female. The Royal Family had her brain engineered for a scientific career and had those elements like affection, motherly instinct and her feminine side adjusted. She still had nerve and guile but no ambitions so she could never threaten the succession of the Fire Lord.

The screen showed an image of the Earth and for added visual presence an image grew out of a holographic projector hidden in the table.

"We found traces of radioactive isotopes produced by nuclear fusion devises in the atmosphere concentrated around major cities." Another man with a long gray beard asked from behind his cold amber eyes. Azula knew him as Osanji – Head of Exobiology. "We have found vast traces of dust and the products of combustion – carbon dioxide and soot in the atmosphere. Whatever the cause," Osanji said as a direct taunt to Karo. "We have to conclude the planet experienced a major nuclear exchange."

The hologram changed as he spoke to reflect their findings.

"We have no mission," The Second in Command – Lady Waipa – spoke sternly. "Quite frankly, I failed to see the purpose of sending us to the far flung reaches of the Empire to this place on the pretext of a survey mission. We could have more cheaply used probes as our spies. Other than some kind of propaganda value, this mission had little purpose to begin with. Now we have few if any inhabitants to study. I see little value in surveying and mapping to the nearest unit of area a poisoned and dead or dying realm."

Azula sensed a dig at her.

Lady Waipa was a handsome woman in her mid thirties with the brown hair Azula knew reflected her Water Tribe inheritance. She wore her hair in a long braid and had a bearing that showed strength but she had earned Azula's respect for her wisdom and kind nature. Azula knew when she spoke, one ought to listen for Lady Waipa had a grasp of many pragmatic details. "What can we do? I have no desire to become a school master to a race that blasted themselves back into the stone age and even at the best of times this planet proved barely habitable to our race."

"We still have a boundary to defend." Princess Azula spoke up. "I respect your opinion, but we have to defend our boundaries against other races and the nomadic pirates that lurk on our borders." Azula disliked arguing with Waipa but she had to defend the Imperial interests. "What if we ignore the Earth – now defenceless – and the Hakuri move in and set up bases?"

"We beat the Hakuri in the Great Iceworld War."

"That really didn't count as a war as the Hakuri had barely begun to step out into space." Azula remind Lady Waipa. "At the time, the Empire only had to blow up a few of their larger ships and they retreated. We have settled with the Hakuri and we trade with them but the destruction of the humans could reignite new ambitions among them. They have had a century to advance and build their confidence"

"The Hakuri have not turned up in this sector for many decades." Lady Waipa crossed her arms.

"They may decide to step out again and assert themselves," Azula huffed, "and the humans may hold important answers about many of our most persistent scientific mysteries. Why do we have three races built on the same basic body plan. We have always said that's a coincidence but we find no such similarities on other planets that support life. Even if we see no military benefit in this sector, we should see the value in studying the Earth."

---

"You had to piss off Lady Waipa?" Karo stirred his tea as they sat together in the aft cafeteria of the ship as they attempted to relax after the tense meeting. "This sector has nothing of interest to us other than the Earth. We only found them interesting because they are the only other intelligent hominid race we have ever found out here other than the Hakuri."

Azula stirred her tea in frustration. "We have always wondered why hominids would evolve on three separate worlds and those three races would have attained intelligence. "We have found over three hundred worlds within our Empire that support life and have established colonies on a hundred of them. We have found in most cases that the most advanced life amounts to cold blooded reptiles, dumb mammals, the odd bird, flowering plants and social insects."

"We have trade with the Wakkar – insect like life with spaceflight. They make graphene and nanotubes so cheaply." Karo answered in an effort to refute that last statement. "They have a hive mind though and never sent anything but freight our way..."

"Even with jump engines, we've only explored a few hundred light years in any direction." Karo spoke of the slow pace of space travel, They had spent months to arrive at Earth and only those wired to withstand such long trips could endure such voyages into the void.

"We're two thirds the size of either the human or the Hakuri but we have the same body plan. Why share such things in common?" Azula sipped her tea. "Lady Waipa like all members of the military caste, have no real appreciation for the importance of these kinds of questions."

"We may have the same body plan but the humans and the Hakuri make use of phosphorus in their biology while we make use of arsenic." Karo pointed at himself. "When we took the Hakuri prisoner; we found this out when they became sick from our food."

"I know that." Azula reminded Karo. "I became a member of the Royal Academy of Science because my mother gave me a membership as a gift. The Royal Academy regards me as their team mascot – I'm important so they look important – no one takes me seriously as a real scientist. I have to defend the interests of the Empire and of science. In this case, the two are one and the same."

Lady Waipa walked into the mess and the small number of crew present stood up in respect. She headed straight for Azula and Karo as her braided brown hair flipped in the air.

"A nice lecture Princess," Lady Waipa smiled at Azula as if she were very pleased with some kind of torment she was about to hand out to the princess. "Want to put your words into action?"

---

"When we meet an Earthling without his skin peeling off what do we say?" Karo guided the scout ship as its pilot.

"We do what Lady Waipa commanded." Azula said as she hid her frustration with Karo.

They flew a Sakuz 280 scout ship which looked alien. It looked like a flying bird of prey combined with a military helicopter. It had a mother of pearl white finish with the Kaitanni flame logo on the underside and the topside. Karo knew that no amount of calculated lying could make the craft seem human. It had a tail that contained the magnetic coils to contain the ionized engine gas and generate thrust which looked almost like a shark tail and on landing, the ship had a menacing shape like a hawk with its wings spread out to take prey.

"Humans?" Karo pleaded. "Why humans? I know nothing of humans! She sent us out to this awful place based on a weak set of signals we received from the planets."

"We received a digital signal from this location." Azula reminded Karo as she pressed the touch screen and examined the complex but weak signals the communications crew had picked up. The same crews had picked up weak analog short wave band signals but as Azula knew, they had received only one cohesive, digital signal in the microwave band from one location. "Why would we receive a signal from a remote forest in the northwestern portion of the American continent?"

"I have no idea," Karo added, "but they didn't intend their signal to reach out to us. You see the similarities but I can only see the vast differences between our two races."

"We are very similar."

"Save that they don't have saturated colors in the iris of their eyes." Karo felt the need to express his concerns to Azula. He had the ship talking to him through his artificial brain and somehow that calmed his nerves and the task at hand distracted him from the tension of the unknown.

"We do as we're told. I also see a mystery here – one that would be unanswered if the human race died." Azula shrugged, "I don't think a God made us the same but something did. The difference in eye color amount to minor genetic differences. The rest is too huge a coincidence to ignore."

Karo guided his craft gently into an orbital path. He communed with his scout ship and could see the tracks of tiny pieces of space debris that had once been the International Space Station as the sensors of the ship picked them up.

"Lady Waipa had a good reason for sending us out here," Azula reminded Karo, "and we may not like the order but we have to carry it out. We land and contact these people."

"Why?" Karo took a little time to ask but he viewed this as a means for Azula to gain the respect of the likes of Lady Waipa and hoped this didn't come at his expense."They had a nuclear war and blew themselves up. This won't make for a great diplomatic mission."

"We..." Azula tapped her console in anger. "How do I know!"

Any human watching the craft descend could tell the ship was not from Earth. It didn't worry about heat or glide to the planet surface on wings. It plunged and simply made a straight path through the atmosphere as if the iron melting, white hot temperatures were casual.

Karo adjusted the craft to take the shortest course as it began plunging into the atmosphere. He had magnetic force fields to protect his craft and the stuff of his craft had to take plunging through the denser atmosphere of his home. He had no worry about re-entry as he approached a remote park campground in the Pacific Northwest. He watched plasma votices of blue and orange form plumes and circle around the craft. If they were an unidentified flying object, they wouldn't be for long.

---

"I can't shower!" Carly cried out to her brother Spencer as they stood in the gold light of the RV. The crew of iCarly had come to the remote park to recreate in a 1970's style recreational vehicle and the world had destroyed itself. Carly had wondered about her father who had served aboard the very kind of sub designed to keep the balance of power in the world. Freddie had listened to the world fall silent. Sam had set animal traps. Spencer wondered if he could make the dead branches into a saleable sculpture.

A loud rumble shook the RV and the lights flickered.

Freddie looked up with a set of old Soviet made night vision goggles and saw a green colored craft hover. It looked scary, like a huge bird that grabbed a person and flew off to feed it to her young and he ran back to the aluminum comfort of the RV.

Sam saw bright glowing lights as a loud sound shook the forest. She had begun setting up food nets with Freddie but she had expected the world to end and also expected the aliens to show up and enslave her. She watched as the bright lights hovered and slowly descended into a forest clearing. She bashed a stick against her palm and stared at the craft through the stark shadows it cast through the spruce and cedar trees and figured she would make them feel Earth pain.

The ship slowly descended like a bad Hollywood stereotype. The long tail fell between the trees slowly as Sam watched and waited to club some aliens with a cedar tree branch. Freddie grabbed her as he had decided the better part of valor was keeping a friend from getting creamed and rushed back out out the recreational vehicle.

"We do not meet – mean you any hamp – harm – Damn you Karo!" The ship's public address system spoke. Some things had not improved in the Long March of Civilization and public address systems were one of them. A 1920's train station public address system probably sounded much the same to train travellers as a public address system made by factory robots in a facility on the moon of the home planet.

The ship landed as softly as a head on a feather pillow.

"Our knowledge of their language is not complete!" A voice much like a young boy pleaded. "I tried my best but incomplete information is incomplete."

"We wish you no harm!" The female voice spoke between a thump and a loud pulse of feedback. "We came in peace because we saw great disaster strike your planet." The voice spoke slowly. On board the ship, Karo helped Azula pick words he felt certain he had the correct pronunciation for. Azula wondered if the portable devices they carried in their ears would also screw up.

She tapped the touch screen to turn the public address system off.

"Let me know if we have time to make preparations to join our ancestors before they eat us." She prodded Karo to undo his zero gee harness.

Azula walked down the passenger cabin of the ship to the back and slid her hand over a sensor to the left of the door and the heavy door slid up with a low metallic hum. Karo could feel the heavier gravity pulling him down and felt like his stomach had begun to sag. They walked through into a octagonal room the size of a washroom. Both of them reached into their vests and pulled out round yellow plugs and inserted them into each nostril. The small devices acted as filters to make the thin atmosphere breathable. Azula pressed a button and the door slid shut. A siren sounded the alarm as the chamber began to fill with the Earth atmosphere. Both of them felt their ears pop as the pressure dropped.

A series of clangs now made sharper by the thin air rang through the small compartment and it began to lower both of them to the ground. The door began to slide down and formed a ramp. Karo squinted at the light of the late afternoon as it came through the forest.

"How many weapons did we bring?" Karo asked as he stared out into the bright light and tried to resolve detail.

"None." Azula told him. "And our loose fitting clothing is flammable."

"Good to know I'm safe." Karo stepped onto the ramp and because of the heavier gravity lost his footing and landed at the feet of a tall male and a teenage boy. He panicked and began emitting wireless signals and much to his surprise obtained a response from nearby and he saw a flurry of images.

Azula had never stepped onto another world. She heard a loud war cry and a blond girl knocked her to her feet with a force that winded her.

Neither of them could react quickly or with strength. The Earth had gravity that was ten percent stronger and despite the filters, they had mild case of hypoxia. They could not put up a fight as the blond girl screamed and hogtied them.

---

Spencer served coffee in the kitchen of the old RV. "Sorry about that." He smiled in a friendly but somewhat uncomfortable way. "Sam tends to go overboard."

The aliens sniffed and Azula scanned the coffee with a small device made of white plastic. They looked around the old 1970's RV and realized had these poor souls been much closer the thin, ugly white aluminum and plastic walls of the frail vehicle would have blown apart and they would have roasted to death.

"I could have lived without being tied up," Azula shivered from fear. "I thought for a moment you might cook us and eat us."

Carly looked scared at the sight of both of them.

Sam glared at both of them.

Azula held out her palm and from a ring on her left hand a delicate hologram emerged showing the Earth and telescoping in on their location. "We picked up a weak signal from this location which came from a low power transmitter – we had not expected this so we came to investigate."

"You want to use us as your slaves!" Sam threatened to punch Karo.

Azula waved her off. "We could but what could you do as slaves that machines couldn't do better? You must know we come from a much more advanced civilization."

"I kept trying to contact the outside through the 4G connection on my laptop," Freddie began, and have picked up nothing." Freddie held out a wireless 4G USB key and began holding it to Karo's skull. "I didn't expect to meet an alien who could talk to computers. You could teach us so much!"

"Get that probe away from me!" Karo screamed as his voice struggled to work against the thin air.

"I wanted to know if I could talk to you through wireless." Freddie said apologetically. "So many new things you could show me!"

"I don't know you that well!" Karo replied.

"What happened here?" Azula asked calmly.

"We don't know." Spencer answered. "We came out here for some camping and fishing and the world went phoom!" Spencer threw his hands wide. "What do you know?"

"You sustained a major meteor hit off the coast of Israel," Karo replied. "We had thought you tracked those! We didn't expect you to embark on a full nuclear war after that!"

Carly cried. "Why didn't you stop us!" She grabbed Azula's robes and beat her. Azula had no sense of the human's real strengths until she felt blows landing on her chest from a teenage girl and the combination of thin atmosphere and the fact she lacked a human's physical strength nearly knocked her over.

"We had no idea," Azula replied as she kindly held Carly's arms to stop the rain of blows against her, "we had no idea this would happen."

"You could have stopped this!" Carly cried against Azula's vest. "You could have stopped all this death. My dad is dead!"

"We only saw this when we sent an unmanned probe here." Karo intervened. "We couldn't have done anything because we arrived long after it all happened."

"Our translator works too well!" Azula declared as she held Carly's arms as Carly continued to flail at her in fury and grief. "I can't think of anything to say! I am so sorry for your loss."

"What is your name?" Azula held Carly's wrists.

"Carly Shea – but it doesn't matter!" She cried into Azula's rough black vest.

Carly judged the strange yet beautiful alien as similar to her age and she cried into her rough garments. She had no idea what to expect and yet Azula seemed compassionate and genuinely concerned and so after a week of nightmares she decided to trust another person.

"It does matter." Azula answered honestly.

"You can help us record your people." She had no other idea what to say as she hugged the young girl. "I wish I knew what to say but I was a pampered Royal Princess and I will admit to feeling overwhelmed."

"You look like it." Sam threatened. "I mean you have the amber eyes and your friend with the pink ones can talk to Freddie's computer."

Karo blushed. "It was a simple protocol from a primitive system."

Freddie looked at Karo as if he had witnessed the descent of Jesus. "You're a computer?"

"Not entirely." Karo said politely but had a hint of being offended. "I can talk to computers. We found your signal and I am trying to help and learn more about your people." Karo winced at the suggestion he had anything in common with human computers. He blushed. "As I said it was a primitive system."

"We won them over to our side?" Karo asked a split second later. It seemed to him a reasonable question given that a muscular female primate made a motion so quick he failed to dodge and now held him up by his throat. He felt that passing out would be undiplomatic but likely.

'I think she wants to beat you up. Perhaps you made a rude gesture." Azula looked him and judged the blond haired girl could do something to her that involved pulping her head. "I would help you but she looks mean. If you survive I'll erase your memory of the unfortunate events."

"Ah well I didn't know having thumbs would give rise to such rage." Karo coughed as he looked down at the long blond braids of his assailant who had lifted him clear off the ground. "The bruises all over me will remain a mystery to me? Is that on? Did you leave the translator software on! The ape can hear me? We suck at this."

"You left it on."

"Tell me when I have to dodge poo."

"Kar Li?" Azula found the dark brown haired female had a nice smell despite Karo's objection's to the funk given off by the apes. "I feel sadness for your loss." Azula could see Karo prompting him. "Can you have the blond female let go of my friend?"

"Sam?" Carly asked quietly. "Let the computer dude down."

"I have extremely finely calibrated systems." Karo said abruptly as he hit the floor at a slightly higher g-force than his body expected. He rubbed his backside and glowered at Sam. "I feel for your emotional grief as far as my own mental makeup permits me, but do you genuinely think killing me would help?"

"Karo?" Azula asked quietly. "Don't you have some kind of First Contact Protocol rattling in that noodle of yours?"

"It involved not having a burly girl beat me up."

"That Tin Man dude should know better than to bother me – I haven't had a decent meal in three days." She scowled at Karo who looked down and then scowled at the tallest male. "Spencer didn't buy enough food for the Apocalypse and we've only had boiled noodles the last few days. Do you have some food? Real food like the kind that once walked on four legs or had wings?"

Karo whimpered. "Meat? We can offer you some Imperial Ration Packs which should meet all the nutritional demands of our species but from what little I understand of human biology...arsenic might have ill effects. We have medication to help with that. They don't differ from your pot noodles in any other way. I sense you want to hit me but please not in the face."

"I'm Freddie," a young male about Karo's age introduced himself and held out his hand. Karo bowed.

"I know," Karo said dryly. "How did you discover I had an artificial brain?"

"You tried to log onto my computer." Freddie said as if it were self evident. "You'll have to excuse Sam. We have had a hard few days. Until you guys arrived, we had no idea what happened to the outside world."

"I bet Tin Man and the dainty chick came down to take over the world!" Sam approached Azula who backed up into a wall.

Azula had never faced much more than the raised voice of her mother and felt very tense and nervous. She knew that at nearly twice her weight and with her muscular build, Sam could seriously injure her. The RV suddenly became very small but Azula remained calm for she represented the royal family.

"We didn't come to conquer your race," Azula's amber eyes narrowed, "and we didn't come to harm any of you."

"Stop it," Carly threw herself between Azula and Sam. "Does she look like she could hurt you?"

"Relax!" Spencer added. "Welcome to Earth."

"I have a web show to rehearse for." Carly said sadly as she pushed Sam away from Azula.

"We do this show on the Internet – iCarly." Freddie explained. "We did this show...I mean.

Azula nodded and patted Carly on the back. "A web show? Some kind of human entertainment?"

"We could introduce our alien friends to the world!" Sam pointed at Karo. "They can see that not just Freddie is a freak." She flicked her finger across Karo's skull. "We can show off our spanking brand new android to the world!"

"I'm a cybernetic organism," Karo seemed on the edge of irritation, "and is the human race ready to know life exists in outer space?"

---

"Life has two truisms," Azula said as she entered the cockpit and found Karo mucking about with the computer. "Nobody gets if for free and the dolt should not have given the humans the pass code to enter the ship."

"Uh huh?" Karo said quietly. "They had begun to smell off even for humans. I felt they all could use some of the comforts and amenities of our ship."

That Kar Li girl has spent two hours in our shower." Azula patted Karo on his shoulder. "If she spends any longer we'll lose cooling to the reactor core." She put her hands on her hips. "I think I will try and talk to her."

"The kinds of pain she faces, you have no words for."

"I suppose so but I need to use the washroom." Azula leaned over Karo as he sat in the high back chair of the pilot seat. "If we had spacesuits, I would at least be able to wet them."

"I used the bushes," Karo pointed out the window at a shiny green bush brightly lit up by the morning sun. "Avoid that shiny bush or you'll itch in places only your doctor should probe."

Azula slapped the back of Karo's head. "Do you remember anything from your training with the Royal Space Academy. One rule is never to use a foreign ecosystem as a toilet facility unless you want to find out your true place in the food chain. Do you have any idea what could be wandering out there looking for a meal?"

"Raccoons." Karo answered. "Take a taser."

"Arrgh!"

"What's with her?" Spencer knelt down behind Karo in the cramped cockpit.

Karo turned around. "She needs the bathroom and your sister has decided to take a long shower."

"My sister takes long showers when she's depressed." Spencer banged his head as he tried to stand up in the cramped cockpit. "We survived the nuclear attack but we have no idea if our father survived. He serves on a US submarine and Carly has had a hard time dealing with the uncertainty." He looked uncomfortable as he tried to fit his gangly frame into the small space. "The RV wouldn't start. I thought I could head back to the city but I thought it was safer to stay here because of the fallout."

"The city is a smoking ruin." Karo uttered with what Spencer had come to regard as his frankness. "None of you would survive an hour."

"Do you have a bathroom on your recreational vehicle?" Azula poked her head into the cockpit with a grey roll of toilet tissue in her left hand. "Or do I have to file my application to eliminate bodily waste in triplicate some point in advance through the appropriate Royal Ministry that attends to such affairs? Do I need to purchase tokens?"

"We have a chemical toilet."

"Great...as long as it's a toilet." Azula reached over Karo's shoulder and tapped a control. "The blond girl has crawled into the ship and has taken to wandering around the reactor core."

Karo didn't react as he watched Sam crawling along with a long cable in her mouth on the heads up display. "I knowexactly where she is. She brought some kind of electric grill with her and wants to steal power so she can cook some meat. She needs a source of electric power that can operate a large grill and the solar panels on their vehicle won't work." Karo communed with the ship systems and knew what Sam had in mind given that the small propane and solar powered electric appliances couldn't cook any game she might catch. "I may have missed my guess but she has little or no knowledge of Kaitanni power systems so she'll climb over the reactor and among the wiring and give up.

"Good on you." Azula patted Karo's shoulder. "If you want me, I'll be trying to work a chemical toilet which probably will prove more difficult than using a zero gravity toilet."

---

"Toilet and bucket must have the same meaning in the alien's language." Azula straightened out her vest and bumped into Sam as she entered the RV. "When I get back to the ship, I'll have a word with one of those brain dead programmers who programmed my translator."

"Do you have an oven on your ship?" Sam held up a raccoon hanging by a noose. "I want to cook this once I skin it."

Azula had to look up at Sam physically to look down at her scornfully and Sam discovered that the look on someone's face that meant 'you must be freaking out of your mind' looked the same even from an alien species. Azula stepped back as the raccoon twitched. "No...and I will have a word with my associate to make sure our answers are consistent on that point."

"Do you know how to skin a raccoon?" Sam shook the inert animal.

"Oddly enough, I haven't a clue. I suppose you somehow remove the top layer of tissue but I must say I never gave it much thought since most living things have a strong attachment to their skin." Azula backed up further. "As we explained to you, our people don't have much skill in hunting or having hunted, dealing with what we caught."

"I came to warn you that Sam bashed a raccoon into unconsciousness." Gasping for breath and waving, Karo rushed up to the RV door. "She took a wrench to its head and – well I don't have to tell you."

Sam turned to Karo. "How much power does your ship generate?"

"I might have an artificial brain but I'm not that stupid." Karo wrapped his hands around his back. "I can see this as a rather simple attempt to insult my intelligence and cook a mammal. I remind you that we have no medical expertise and so curing you of some kind of brain eating parasite might require us to remove your brain, soak it in disinfectant and stuff it back in." Karo spoke as if delivering a simple explanation. "We can't guarantee your survival or that you will still be able to name colors."

"I'm going insane!" Sam dropped the raccoon which twitched on the ground, righted itself, undid the rope with its black furry hands and loped out the door past Karo. "I have no meat, no TV and nothing to do! How can I cope!"

---

Freddie could log onto an account Karo had set up for his use on the ship computer. Karo wanted a repository for all of those important files he wished preserved as a record of life on Earth. He had considered his laptop to have the best features but the electromagnetic pulse had damaged it and it had a tendency to reboot unexpectedly. Karo had done his best to repair the thing and it proved serviceable but slow. Freddie had to learn how to use a vastly more advanced system designed by alien engineers with little or no thought to the user. Karo could speak the binary language of computers and duplicated the look and feel of the laptop operating system. With a holographic processing computer which could credibly think; the experience proved odd since the computer as much anticipated things as executed tasks. The iCarly team could produce a web show on a computer with as much local storage as their whole web but they had no web for their show.

"Good morning," Karo worked at pouring his coffee as he tried to sound cheerful in his greeting. He didn't like coffee but the humans drank the milk of cows and Karo had no real idea where such depravity could lead. "Is the link to the ship computer working well?"

"Yeah." Freddie said sadly.

Karo picked up a few yellow artificial sweetener packets and placed his coffee down on the table and proceeded to rip the packets open.

"Will we ever repair our planet?" Freddie asked Karo as he sat with him at the table.

"The planet should repair itself." Karo had discovered that coffee was not toxic but tasted awful, bitter and so he stirred artificial sweetener into the brownish black liquid until it became less likely to induce vomiting. He watched the white powder foam and then dissolve in the Styrofoam cup. "Whether the humans have any role in its future remains to be seen."

Freddie showed Karo a clip from the latest show. "What do you think?" Freddie looked at his computer. "We all want to keep the show going but we have no audience."

"How did you get Azula to wear red foam antlers?" Karo watched Azula try and dance and largely fail. "How did you convince her to dance?"

"She wanted to help." Freddie replied with a little laugh. "She wants to help us in our grief I guess. When the bombs went off, the RV wouldn't start and we wound up trapped here given that every inhabited area had become a radioactive wasteland. We have friends in the city and I would imagine they're dead. School would have started next week but now we have no school and no students. None of us can sleep well at night and I have nightmares."

"I see," Karo had nothing to say – he never dreamed. He didn't have to. He had an artificial brain that held the image of a biological one but unlike a biological brain, had no need for biological brain functions like REM sleep. Karo did sleep to rest his body which remained biological but he merely turned off his higher functions so he wouldn't get bored.

"Would you take us back to the city to look for our family?" Freddie asked as Karo winced and drank a large mouth full of coffee. "You could fly us there in your ship."

"No...but," Karo said as he straightened out the grimace on his face, "I don't want to sound unsympathetic. Even if we could find anyone, the city will have many unseen dangers – radiation, feral animals, roving gangs and buildings nearing collapse. Such situations could turn up all of the sudden. Wouldn't your family want you to live?"

---

"A medics kit and a raccoon? One of us got up in an odd mood this morning. We've only been on this rock one day and you've lost your mind. Do I have to reload it from a backup?" Azula found Karo at the small table in the RV doing something that hinted of a biological experiment that would have ethical implications. "A dead raccoon? Sam needed a good meal?"

"Not dead," Karo answered.

"Anyway, where are the others?"

"They left on a walk to the top of the nearby rise. They wanted to take a look at what remained of their city and decide what to do next."

"I had an idea." Karo held a white plastic scanner in his hand. "On our planet, some mammals can hibernate. I trapped our little friend and programmed our medic kit to try and induce hibernation and blow my mind if the little bugger's body temperature didn't fall off a cliff and if he didn't kind of die." He handed the scanner to Azula. "He lives in a way."

"Good for him." Azula handed the white scanner. "How does this help us?"

"Maybe we could place these people in a kind of suspended animation until their society recovered sufficiently to provide them with some quality of life." Karo prodded the raccoon. "We've used cryogenics and suspended animation on ourselves in the days before jump drives where voyages between stars took decades. If we knew their civilization would recover then we could place them in suspended animation and maybe in a few hundred years somehow have them revived."

"Your raccoon is warming up." Azula stepped back and grabbed Karo's collar. "Even if it worked – I have my doubts – don't you think it would be a cruel fate to find yourself in an unknown future? You would have no family and everything would have changed." She pulled Karo back as the raccoon snarled. "Where did you find a raccoon?"

"Sam's traps caught one." Karo stood back. "I found him caught in a net when I went for a walk around the camp this morning. I stunned it with a taser and brought it here."

Azula kicked the door of the RV open hoping to provide the proper incentive for the raccoon to leave or give them an escape route. "Now is not the appropriate time for you to develop initiative." She tossed Karo out of the RV into the bright warm sunshine of the clearing and followed him. She grabbed him and began to run as she heard the raccoon hiss and realized it had decided to chase them. She shoved Karo ahead of her and they both began running through the forest pushing ferns and bushes out of their way until they both heard a snap and a rope trap lifted them up off the ground.

"My translator fell out of my ear!" Karo exclaimed as he hung upside down and swung three meters off the ground staring at a very angry raccoon.

Azula checked her ear and found the device in place as she watched Karo's fall.

"Shut up and let me think!" Azula said in their native language. "Your artificial brain should have sampled enough human speech to allow us to cope without gadgets in our ears." She knew Karo could do this since his brain didn't act like an organic brain; rather emulate with some precision the behavior of such a brain. Karo had this ability as it gave him a gamut of adaptive emotions and a drive to remain alive which proved useful for long term reliability where life often depended on avoiding situations that killed a cybernetic organism like cliffs or kitchen appliances. It worked too well as Karo often forgot that beneath this layer of humanity; he had access to a powerful computer for which a new language amounted to compiling a new application.

Karo hated to do this but he could. He had intelligence but the underlying computer software and hardware had profound stupidity. Natural learning by trial and error worked slowly but left behind adept skills. A compiled program saved time but the compiler didn't catch every possible error. He hated the strange puppet like feeling he had when he ran a compiled program and his body or mind did things beyond the understanding of his natural experience. When a program failed, it left him disoriented and purged of a memory or two. He sighed and waited. Nothing obvious came back as an error but he knew the first time he heard an English sentence he might look stunned for a moment and then be unable to produce anything in the language.

"Well?" Azula asked as she fumbled with the lower part of her uniform which hung down over her face. "Ask for help! If my translator doesn't screw it up, we can assume you've got it."

"Excuse me if it is not so much..." Karo paused, "if it would not be a great deal of trouble. We could use some help."

"So long, and thanks for all the fish?" Azula struggled with the yellow nylon rope. "One of us is mucking up."

---

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

---

The Empire of the Fire Nation

Chapter 2: The Bad Fortunes of Carly

"When I fish, I," Karo sat across from Sam at the RV table as Azula did their best to try and retrieve something of his command of the human language. He blinked and then picked up his coffee and sipped it. Sam had scared off the raccoon, freed them by cutting them down and discovered Karo's earpiece translator and now Karo had a glitch and found himself confused by the translator and wondering why all the humans talked about fish.

Freddie watched foreign characters in lines scroll down his laptop screen ad Karo wirelessly swapped huge chunks of code back and forth trying to hunt down the errors that had compiled into the program he had built to enable him to understand all human language unaided. Freddie saw some rather stupendous sized hunks of data fly between Karo's brain and the ship and back.

"Is the Tin Man broken?" Sam asked sarcastically.

Carly stood to one side of Sam and slapped her shoulder.

"Up fish your fish!" Karo said emphatically.

Azula patted Karo on the shoulder then spoke in their natural language. "You'll have to purge that program."

"I think I have a handle on the root of the problem," Karo replied in his first language and removed the translator and stared dead ahead.

Freddie watched in fascination. He watched intelligence as symbols on a screen. He had no idea what most of them meant and since Karo has a holographic processor for a brain; had no chance of being easily brought up to speed on much of what now took place.

"If he becomes a brain dead vegetable can we eat him?" Sam asked.

Carly wanted to slap her but Karo blinked. "I would taste foul. I feel much better now."

"How did you fix it?" Freddie asked enthusiastically.

"I did my original work under great duress," Karo explained calmly, "and forgot to compensate for the fact the human language centers in the brain has differences from our own." Karo pulled out the translator. "The translator works by detecting the activity of the language centers of the brain but have no ability to do this so I have to rely on spoken words." Karo felt relief as he could communicate once more. "I should explain this in more detail."

"No!" Sam and Carly exclaimed.

"If you're such a fast computer why can't you figure out how to get us out of this situation!" Sam said abruptly. "All the radiation and stuff."

"You want a different kind of saviour than Karo," Azula said to calm Sam. "We may have crossed vast expanses of space but we're fragile mortals."

"So you can't find my father?" Carly asked Azula.

Azula remained silent for a few moments. She had only a few years on Carly and whether that meant an extra measure of wisdom, Azula didn't know.

"The Crimson Dragon has begun orbiting the Earth and has more sensitive surveys but found nothing." Azula said carefully. "We have only two days before we have to return and we have to decide if you will come with us for your protection until we can find a suitable place for you to make a new life. I admit the chances remain slim. We can leave you here with as many supplies and a survival kit but it won't be much of a life."

"If we found our father and a place to live, could we make a life here?" Carly asked shyly.

"The chances are slim." Azula reminded Carly. "Given that we have not yet found any surviving cities, I can't tell you that would be easy."

Carly had not yet come to understand fully that the Kaitanni had a strange tendency to understate things.

"Freddie can access our ship records and link up to the Crimson Dragon so you can look at our scans of the Earth." Azula offered. "Karo and I have can only stay for a few more days before we must leave."

"Why do you have to leave?" Freddie asked both Karo and Azula.

"We can't cope too long with the high levels of radiation even in this remote place." Karo pointed ran his finger along the film of fine grey dust on the table that he knew contained fallout. "In fact none of you can cope for too much longer with the radiation in this place before you gravely increase your chances of illness in the future."

Spencer ran into the RV dragging leaves and grass into the space Carly had spent her time cleaning obsessively as a hedge against her despair.

"I saw a UFO." Spencer gasped.

"Like our ship?" Azula asked. "That would be an IFO or Identified Flying Object."

"Bigger!" Spencer gestured trying to make a model of the ship with his hands. "Like a big truck!"

"One of our cargo ships?" Azula asked and didn't expect and answer. The Crimson Dragon had two cargo ships for support and heavy hauling and she heard the dull rumble of very powerful engines slowly fly overhead.

"A square slab of metal that flies?" Spencer looked desperate to explain what he had seen hovering in all defiance of physical law several hundred meters above the treetops. Azula knew the ship as a heavy lift ship designed for short range shipping or supply runs. It had a cockpit and a hollow belly with a crane at the top designed to hold twenty or more shipping containers. It hovered over a site and lowered the containers to the ground or on board a ship.

The large shiny metal hook that fell through the RV with barbs on the tips came as a surprise to everyone. It plunged through the RV and everyone felt a lurch as the RV – a vehicle unable to float – rose into the sky past the tops of the trees.

"Lady Waipa must have grown impatient with us," Azula grumbled as she watched the RV rise into the metal hold of the ship. "As you humans would say, she wears the trousers in the command staff."

"Pants." Sam corrected.

"Now is not the time to be pedantic." Azula warned.

The Koya Class freighter didn't indulge in any sort of consent to aesthetics. It had the same color scheme as the other Fire Nation ships but looked like a cereal box flying on its short side with a cockpit at the top and a large assortments of pipes and an engine cone at the back. It handled the RV with all the care of a child emptying a cereal box. Everyone heard a series of clangs, the sound of RV grinding on dense metal and then a loud crunch. They could see nothing outside of the RV and didn't expect a bright blue plasma cutter to cut through the back wall of the RV and make a meter and a half wide circular hole.

"If I had my choice," Lady Waipa addressed Karo and Azula with bitter withering scorn, "I would throw you both into the brig to rot until we returned home."

"What did I do?" Karo protested as Lady Waipa walked past him. "Ma'am?"

"Ignored our orders to return to the ship!" Lady Waipa delivered a withering gaze at Karo. "Refused to leave the humans!"

"I received no such orders; I would have made a record of...Azula?" Karo looked to his partner. "You erased my logs didn't you? Azula, how could you fiddle with my memories!"

"I had to save these poor people!" Azula looked at Lady Azula with pleading eyes. "I had to do something!

"You descended from your namesake the cruel Princess Azula, Conqueror of Ba Sing Se?" Lady Waipa stood over Azula. "Well," she paused and then smiled. "Nice to know a future princess has compassion and won't blindly follow orders." She patted Azula's shoulder. "You look so much like the mad princess but I want to know I serve moral people of good character. You have certainly redeemed your name and made the Fire Lord aware that you can think for yourself."

"She scrambled my brain!" Karo complained.

"Unlock '1670, 1754, 0045, 2376, 0107'" Lady Waipa said slowly. "She wouldn't want you permanently injured. That will unlock the messages."

"Azula!" Karo protested as the messages poured into his conscious memory.

Lady Waipa looked at the humans as if unsure. "I have feelings for the suffering but couldn't you have made this easier for us?" Lady Waipa looked at Azula who looked down at her feet like a child receiving a scolding.

"I had to do something!" Princess Azula protested.

Karo knew Azula had a strong sense of right and wrong and a strong moral sense of outrage and an even stronger sense of compassion. Lady Waipa could command this woman but not rule her when she believed principles were at stake.

If raccoons had thoughts; one might be gratitude as the large slap of ship lifted off and sped away followed by the small shuttle controlled by its onboard autopilot.

---

Lady Waipa and two elite and stern looking security officers had led all of them to the medical bay. A doctor checked all of them for health problems with a strange device that looked like a price scanner but produced disturbingly detailed holographic images of their innards. The doctor had a clean shaven face, the mannerisms of an old man, the white hair and wrinkles of an old man and the forgetful nature of an old man. He talked to his patients and pronounced Carly and Freddie fit after he gave medications through a hypo spray to reprogram Carly's immune system to remove the allergies she had and inserted a gene to correct for the clotting disorder Freddie had. Spencer had a mild form of manic depression but the doctor decided to leave it untreated for the time being. Sam made him nervous but she proved physically fit but prone to angry outbursts and set up a series of sessions with the ship counsellor. He had received notice of the arrival of humans and had already prepared doses of the vaccines against Kaitanni diseases. He gave long odds of either of them acquiring Viral Leukaemia or other long conquered diseases but then explained that no one wished to take any risks.

As Carly entered the botanical gardens to search for Azula, the humid air and thirty degree heat hit her like a wall. The air had much more carbon dioxide and this blanketed heat in the room making it feel like a hot July day with no breezes off the ocean. Carly found Azula sitting in the botanical gardens on a bench made of strange blue wood. She rubbed her arms as the hypo spray still left them slightly tender. She felt slightly dizzy since the nose filters provided a breathable atmosphere for her, her inner ear had not yet adjusted to the increased pressure.

"Will anyone remember us?" Carly had slid into the outfit of an academician – blue pants with a dark blue vest and silver trim. Azula had suggested she take the role of artist as her brother Spencer had done and don the purple colors of that caste and wear the crest of an actress. "We've screwed up."
"We've sent probes to sample your lifeforms." Azula said sadly. "We have found some cultural repositories...but I don't know."

Carly sat next to Azula. "My father is dead?"

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure." Carly said.

"I have no clue and can only tell you what I think." Azula began. "We have a life but our race believes that our ancestors still live to guide us." Azula grabbed the bench as she searched for a proper response. "Your father has gone on to fight evil in another reality. He will be there to guide you."

"I will never see him again!" Carly cried as she grabbed Azula's vest.

"I know." Azula patted Carly's back. "He must have been proud of you. He had a decent intelligent daughter."

Carly looked at the overhanging trees. They looked alien yet familiar to her. She was pine trees with odd blue shades to their leaves and ferns that looked bluer than she had expected.

"I miss him and you stole us away from him so I won't ever meet him again"

Azula patted the bench as she spoke softy. "I had no idea when we came here that this would happen." She had the blue wood bench to herself and invited Carly to take a seat. "Where is Sam?"

"She convinced your boyfriend that she wants to lay eggs in his chest." Carly said frankly.

Azula gave Carly a strange glance. "Karo knows more of the facts. That may not make you feel better."

"She enjoys scaring people." Carly placed her hands on her lap. "She used to pick on Freddie before the..." She began to cry once more. "How did we end up here!" Carly had not even begun to grasp the cultural and technological differences between her civilization and what she had come to know as the Kaitanni. She had begun to realize the Kaitanni had a caste system reflected in the colors and decorations on uniforms and wondered how her brother could cope in a rigidly structured society.

"I have tried to explain to you that space – being space – is a vacuum." Karo pushed Spencer through the door to the gardens. "Hence the need for space suits. Does this guy need constant babysitting? I found him trying to open the airlock outside of his quarters. Luckily he didn't know the password or we'd be picking bits of his freeze dried corpse from the inside of the airlock!" Karo threw up his arms. "Where is the blond haired girl ape?"

"Sam?" Spencer asked. "I haven't seen her since this morning."

Carly had never seen her and her brother dress so much alike and yet now it added to her sense of oppression to see him wearing the same loose uniform as her that differed only in terms of color.

"The smell of a fusion reactor going critical?" Karo motioned for Spencer to sit down. "I'll see if I can track her down. I came from a well placed family, trained as a computer engineer and I end up tending apes!" Karo threw up his arms. "When I get home I think I'll quietly go insane and dribble." The doors parted as Karo huffed and muttered something about his sad life.

---

He found Sam standing at the large viewing window in one of the common rooms on a lower deck watching smoke rise from countless fires and form a single blackened cloud that the prevailing winds carried over the Arabian Sea. The vast subcontinent of India slipped beneath the ship. Karo found it difficult to watch. Even in the bright daylight of late summer in India, the cities looked like dark scars on the globe.

The room had tables and chairs for crew members to relax. Karo walked past a Pai Sho table and an octagon shaped red table with a net in the middle. He stood behind Sam out of fear for what she might try to do in her pain and desperation.

"Hello," Karo said nervously, "I came to check on you."

Sam had donned the teal colored uniform given to her and thought she looked like a kind of black vested budgie. Karo found this surprising as it meant she belonged to the caste of orphans and took no house name. He wondered if she knew the significance or simply picked it for the color.

"I have my orders to keep my eye on you."

"We won't do anything." Sam said without turning to face Karo.

Karo raised his left eyebrow. "The tall one – Spencer – nearly let himself out of an airlock. You have a much broader resume of misbehaviour."

"No one will have their customer service calls answered." Sam stared down at the remains of Chennai. "I had a problem with my cell phone and had to call India – they kept me on the phone for three hours." Sam found the red carpet and light gray walls of the common room all too drab but it suited her mood perfectly.

Karo had little idea what customer service was or that India was an ancient and proud country. He had no idea the monsoons would arrive in a matter of weeks but he found the destruction even from a distance heartbreaking.

"What's the plan Tin Man?" Sam asked without turning around. "What will happen to us?"

"I wish I knew." Karo tapped the frame of the window. "You can make lives with us or if some part of your world if they still have some social order. I suppose you'll be allowed to decide when the time comes."

Freddie entered the room gasping. "This ship is immense!" He had taken a tour to satisfy his curious nature but he had no access to the most interesting parts of it like the fusion reactors and computers. He had donned the tan uniform of a computer scientist but out of a good deal of common sense had no access to systems more advanced than the ones he knew. "Carly is still depressed so I wanted to ask you if we could make a web show using your computers?" Freddie could not resist having a glance out the window at the broad and blue Indian Ocean. "We all need to do something to keep our minds off things."

"I don't see why not." Karo approached Freddie and motioned for him to sit down. "I don't know whether the crew will provide much of an audience. I'll have to give you guys an account on our systems and teach you about our computers." Karo scratched his chin as he pondered this. Compared to the primitive silicon based computers the humans had, the ship had a computer as powerful as ten billion such machines cobbled together and even that didn't do it justice. Karo would have to dumb it down to make it behave like a laptop and to keep primate hands off the more delicate and powerful AI routines. "I'll have to make our systems compatible with your software which should be no problem."

"Will PearOS run on your systems?" Freddie asked.

I'm sure we can make your software work," Karo assured Freddie. Karo doubted that 64 bit software running on a silicon chip would pose any problems except for the odd fact that the 64 bit chip had some flaws. 'Humans have such an odd approach to computer programming,' thought Karo to himself. "We simply have to emulate the operating system and induce random errors so the software will behave as it should.

"I'm outta here!" Sam strode toward the door. "Geeks are universal!"

---

"Hey!" Sam yelled as the door of the elevator slid open.

Karo and Freddie walked down the hall and got struck by a football which flew down the brightly lit hallway and smashed against the floor and shattered. Unlike an NFL football which was brown or dark red, this looked clear and glinted like crystal. As Karo noted, it smashed and made fragments which meant Sam had found one of the three dimensional copiers intended to make models or small objects and programmed it somehow to make a football shaped object.

"You're copier code is '1670, 1754, 0045, 2376, 0107' and your computer has a full database on Earth of objects." Sam held out a clear plastic model of a hockey puck. "Why does it make them all out of that cheap clear plastic?"

A square grey robot whizzed down the hall accompanied by two others. They looked like small street sweepers and they communed with blinking lights and then began to work on the mess made by the shattered football.

"You have to properly program it for different kinds of plastic." Karo glared at Sam. "I'm not telling you how to use a replicator!"

"Tell me!"

"No!" Karo backed up behind Freddie. "You have several practical difficulties in using our technology: you can't read our language and not everything has a picture you know."

Sam approached Karo with blazing fury in her eyes.

"It can't make food!" Karo yelled out in desperation. "It uses plastic resin not food molecules. I can't program it to make food."

"So how are you two nerds going to make a web show?" Sam began to push one of the cleaning robots with her feet.

"We're not nerds." Freddie defended himself as the three of them walked down the long hall. "In fact Karo is a well regarded son of a very important family."

"Dude!" Sam pointed at Karo. "Look at him!" She followed Karo and Freddie down the hall partly to taunt them and to also have some of her questions answered.

Karo stopped before a large trapezoidal shaped door painted in a dark gray which slid open. "Welcome to one of our computer labs; sort of like a library and recreational facility. I suppose you can work from here." The room had the look of a college computer lab – beige walls molded from plastic and bright white lights. A row of carrels made of a gray, stained wood were lined up in a row of eight. Karo invited the other two to have a seat at the red covered office chairs that faced a console. "At this point, as much as I've tried to avoid this; I'll have to teach you a few characters in our written language. We don't have an alphabet and I suppose the concept of the unit of meaning and the syllable will prove hard to explain."

"Can I hurt you?" Sam had hidden her own inner torments from Karo and Azula. She had toured the vast ship and found the delicate and cultured Kaitanni ignored her. She decided to make it her project to try and make the nervous Karo even less comfortable.

"I guess I don't need to teach you." Karo tried to hide his fear. "You have to log on by either speaking your name or chose a biometric measure like your thumb print."

"What do I do to log on?" Freddie asked patiently.

"Place your hand on the desk. Sensors implanted in the desk will log you onto the user network."

Freddie placed his hand down and a holographic display rose up out of the grey surface of the desk. It looked both solid and yet three dimensional and it moved as he moved his head but the screen and its alien configuration looked unfamiliar to him. He had expected a desktop, icons and a browser but he didn't even see a pointer or a mouse.

"Let's create your PearOS environment." Karo took a seat next to Freddie while same watched over their shoulder in detached interest. Karo soon had a dozen screens combining together and working away at the task as he moved his arms in a strange sign language the computer had no trouble understanding. "This should work like the laptop and run the same software without a problem."

Freddie watched Karo working away and it struck him just how utterly alien a race Karo came from. Freddie had struggled to learn to program, while Karo had the ability to manipulate code built into his very nature. Karo's eyes darted from side to side and Freddie tried to imagine what strange digital processes conspired to allow him to commune with machines.

---

The botanical gardens played a role in serious research and had a staff of half a dozen botanists and gardeners to tend to them. Carly walked with Azula through the football stadium shaped gardens filled with a maze of trails. She felt warm and comfortable as she wandered around. She wondered how life on two entirely different planets had managed to organize themselves into things she could recognize as trees, ferns, flowering plants, birds and small mammals. A flying lemur landed on the branch of what by all appearances looked like a chestnut tree with strange palm fronds for leaves. It had clusters of hard silver berries the lemur picked off the bunches. Odd but somehow familiar, colorful parrots and small birds flew in the vast spaces over her head. She passed a stone lined pond with a trickle of water running into it. She saw small lizards swimming in it chasing bright purple fish that looked like goldfish. Bright green lily pads with red tulip like flowers grew on the surface, covering a pond which looked about as large as a small backyard swimming pool and about as deep.

Spencer tried to tempt the lemur into sitting on his arm and the animal screamed at him.

"The lemurs are tame," Azula mentioned in passing as they walked around the pond. "The parrots will eat out of your hand once they get to know you." She looked at Carly. "Your heart isn't into any of this."

"All those people," Carly said sadly. "Why did I survive?"

Azula thought for a moment. "Follow me. This ship has a full array of sensors aimed at your planet so why don't we have a look ourselves."

"What do you mean?"

"The aft sensor array," Azula began to walk to one of the doors that led out of the gardens. "In the tail of the ship, we have a sensor array and it has a small control room attached to it for technicians to use to do maintenance. We should be able to make use of the sensor array or at least see all of the data our scientists are looking at. Maybe we can hunt for a few things." She looked at Spencer. "You don't want to eat a good many things in this garden."

Spencer held up the silver berry and examined it. "The flying lemur thing ate it."

"The lemur can handle the high levels of arsenic; you cannot." Azula warned. "We'll have to go over the dietary issues at some point. Let's get going."

Carly nodded but didn't hold out much hope. The four hundred kilometers between the now blacked out Earth and the Crimson Dragon may have been light years given how remote she felt, but she sadly followed Azula. Carly had trouble coping with the manner in which the crew seemed oblivious to their presence and walked past them. 'Deference for Azula?' she didn't know. The Kaitanni were a standoffish lot. Azula led her down a main hallway that went on for hundreds of meters. Carly had trouble with the scale of the ship and the lack of any kind of decoration except for signs to identify things in a language she couldn't read. Azula pressed a panel and a door slid to the side to reveal an elevator with windows and a set of bench seats in gray fabric. The ubiquitous red fabric had now turned blue.

"Can I ask a question?" Carly took a seat. "I had expected lush decorations on board a Royal ship. This ship looked plain and rather boring. My room has red carpet, a plain bed and beige walls. I like the kitchen that delivers cooked food but I had expected gold trim and wood panelling."

"Even the work of the lowest bidder shows at some point." Azula pressed a green arrow that pointed sideways and the car began moving like a tram slowly forward. "The Crimson Dragon came into service forty years ago as a Royal craft for long scientific voyages of exploration sponsored by the Fire Lord or the Royal Science Academy. It visits colonies on the outer rim of our territory, other races, conducts diplomatic research and exploration. If you have a chance to visit the Imperial Palace, you'll see lush decoration but in space; rugs, ornaments and such can become a real problem. We have an artificial gravity system – as you can tell – and that could fail. Even if it failed for a short time, no one wants to deal with loose objects floating around. This explains the bland appearance of our interiors."

Carly hardly heard anything as she watched out the window. The car ran on a track, and windows looking out into the reaches of space lined the track and the car had windows that could look out on the absolute blackness of space, the stark shadows of the sun and the still reassuringly blue, green and brown surface of the Earth as they passed over Western Australia. The tail had a large crescent shape at the end which served to emit magnetic fields to keep the plasma from the engines confined and at high pressure for maximum efficiency. The car stopped in a small alcove at the middle of the crescent and the door at the front end opened.

Carly had no idea how any of this kind of technology worked. She followed Azula into a narrow room filled with neat grey panels. A small window at a forty five degree angle to the main room let her look back at the ship and the southern coast of Australia and made for a dizzying view. The tail end of the ship seemed to hang in the midst of nowhere while the rest of the white and red ship floated over Earth at an angle to her. She thought the ship had a kind of art deco look to the curves which made it look like a kind of fish or odd bird but she couldn't adjust to the strange feeling of having the feeling of gravity pushing her against a floor that looked at an angle to the planet. As she watched the surface of the Earth speed beneath her, she had to look away. Azula's feet clanged along the metal floor.

"Be careful," Azula cautioned. "You'll get sick."

Carly stomped her feet on the black metal of the floor. "I feel like this floor is right below me."

"Artificial gravity," Azula motioned for Carly to take a seat at a gray cloth covered office chair. "Actually real gravity but generated artificially using a gravity wave generator. Kind of like artificial light which is real light generated by passing electricity through a gas." Azula took a seat next to her and began gesturing. "We have a log of radio traffic from what you call HAM radio operators – mainly in remote areas."

Spencer said nothing and stared out of the window as the ship moved over the Earth. He found the ship had a kind of interesting aesthetic he had never seen. As it travelled in space, the constraints of friction or weight bore no role in its design.

"I came to help." Spencer said softly. "I crawled down this fin thing."

Azula said nothing at first as she began to finger the controls for the sensors. "We really need no help." Azula feared Spencer could prove very destructive if he unintentionally managed to access some system.

"I love my little sis." Spencer announced as though the uniform of an artist allowed him to speak.

"I do too." Azula told him. "I find it heartbreaking that she is so sad." Azula paused. "Well." She said slowly. "Carly is so sad and it breaks my heart...maybe I'm stupid for this but I love her."

"No..." Carly said slowly.

---

Karo had walked through the levels of the botanical gardens many times on this voyage but the rope trap came as a bit of a surprise. A springy branch lifted him up off the ground by his left foot. Sam came out of the bushes dressed in camouflage and wielding a machete made of the same plastic as the replicated football.

"Must I ask why?" Karo dangled from the rope.

"You have to real food on this ship!" Sam stood in front of Karo and screamed. "I wanted to catch one of those flying lemurs or one of those colorful parrots. How long does it take to cook you?"

Karo pondered this for a moment as he had discovered the human language had two classes of words – words for sex and euphemisms for sex. He looked at the blond haired girl sternly. "Cut me down – please!"

She cut the rope and Karo fell down on the cobbled path.

"I'm going nuts!" Sam stood over Karo. "Your people are so boring and no one talks to me."

"Perhaps you could try beginning your conversation without that anecdote about your uncle and how a beaver bit his nipple off." Karo dusted himself off as he stood up. "I feel sorry for you and have nothing but sympathy for the fate of your sad people but...perhaps making my life awful doesn't help your cause." Karo stood up and looked dignified which Sam found amusing.

"Did I tell you I was born on a bus?" Sam patted Karo on the shoulder. "My mom didn't plan to have me and my sister and she wrote the book on neglect."

"You don't plan on cooking me?"

"Your people would probably put me in prison." Sam smiled meekly.

Karo raised his eyebrow. "They would have you beheaded but that wouldn't help me."

"I miss my mom." Sam said as she followed Karo through the garden. "I even miss my sister Melanie – little miss perfect. She got all the brains and has the perfect manners and I'm this loner chick that people think is a psychopath."

"Think?"

"Watch it Tin Man!" Sam pointed at Karo. "I know I'm a bit of a handful."

"You scare the crap out of me." Karo admitted. "If you were to ask Azula, she would tell you that lots of things scare me."

"We found evidence someone in Australia still has power." Azula said as she walked into the gardens with Carly. "We picked up a Country and Western music station out of Darwin Australia."

"I talked to a HAM radio operator in Canada," Carly said as the enthusiasm drained from her voice. "He lives in Prince Albert Saskatchewan."

"What did he have to say?" Karo asked.

"Survivors have no medical care and food has become scarce and all communication save HAM radio has been cut." Carly looked down at the ground sadly. "He thinks many will die when the winter comes because people have no power or heat."

---

Karo didn't need sleep and although the day crew and Azula had settled in for a good night sleep; Karo remained wide awake. He knew ship time amounted to a lie maintained to make life easier to schedule. He sat at the workstation at his desk and worked away making final copies of his notes. He kept the light on in his quarters and yet although his quarters had sound proof walls, he worked quietly. He had a bed but found his grey 'thinking chair' his favourite place to rest his mind. He had a pair of Chameleon Fish which changed color to reflect their surroundings and their reaction to danger. At about ten centimeters long and carp like; most humans would take them for iridescent goldfish. They spent their days quietly swimming in a bowl with colors in tune with the grey wall and light blue wood of the night stand. At most times, they were not exciting pets.

When danger loomed, both fish turned a deep red. Had Karo bothered to take a look, he would have noticed both of them turn bright red.

Karo never locked his door. No one on the Crimson Dragon bothered with locking anything except for regions of the ship with hazards such as radiation or the vacuum of space. A disciplined crew made personal security unnecessary or so Karo thought. Sam barged right into Karo's quarters and Karo jumped off his padded office chair.

The door hissed shut and Karo clasped his chest.

"I can't sleep." Sam sat on the edge of Karo's bed and brushed the soft black linens.

Karo shut the holograph projector and turned in his chair. "You should knock before entering." Karo put his hands on his knees. "I could have been in the shower... but anyway."

"You don't sleep do you?" Sam held out her hand. "What do these funky buttons over your bed do?" Sam twiddled the dial and felt cool air on her face and pressing a green button caused a light to flicker on.

"They control a fan and the reading lamp so I can read in bed. I have to do something to make up for all that not sleeping I do."

"Carly's a mess and Freddie's in denial." Sam glared at her Kaitanni clothes. "At least you make me wear boxers under all of these awful looking budgie clothes."

"We're an advanced society." Karo replied as he tried his best to sound sarcastic. He judged it a good and decent effort if somewhat less cutting than Princess Azula.

"I have no one to talk with." Sam lifted her legs and lay back on Karo's bed. "I can't sleep because I don't want to. You put me up in quarters like this and I keep seeing the Earth in my window."

Karo wanted to tell Sam to get her feet off his bed because she still had her boots on but decided against it. "You hit the white button on that panel and the window will go dark." Karo offered helpfully as he pointed at the panel.

"Who are those people?" Sam pointed at an electronic picture frame with a picture of an older man and woman.

"Lady and Lord Zhao – my parents." Karo answered without taking a look. He had come to know his little part of the ship and had a perfect memory for details. "As they were before I left."

"What do your parents do?" Sam asked with the verb do in air quotes. "Lady and Lord – sounds like royalty."

"We are," Karo answered back, "back home, my father owns an estate and my mom is chancellor of the Royal School of Medicine." Karo had to double check his translation of his mother's title. "The House of Zhao can trace its roots back thousands of your years."

"My mom dates men and borrows money from them." Sam adjusted the round plastic bezel for the fan and made it blow air on her face. "She'd be all over you. I bet you have gobs of money and she likes to take men for their money. She once told me I'd turn out just like her."

"What can I do for you Sam?"

"If you tell Freddie or Carly anything, I'll take your head off," Sam waved her arms in the air. "Can I sleep here? I don't want to be alone. You gave me quarters like this but everything's too quiet and freaky."

"Won't I keep you awake?" Karo asked.

"Naw!" Sam waved dismissively. "Even a Tin Man is better company than no one and you don't use this bed."

Karo picked up a silver remote that he kept on his desk. "Very well." He dimmed the lights and closed the blinds on the window.

Azula found Karo at work at an immense climate model that tried to forecast the future climate of the Earth. Over his workstation a hologram of the planet with mapped colors showed the cycle of winter and summer. Clouds of dust and radioactive fallout circled the planet on its jet streams.

---

"I can't ignore the truth," Karo said as Azula looked at Sam as she snored on his bed. "The average global temperatures have taken a nosedive. In Seattle, the city where our guests came from, the temperature has fallen 0.9 degrees Celsius in two of the Earth's days. At ten degrees further north, the temperature has fallen 1.3 degrees. In terms of climate, that's like taking a fall off a cliff." Karo swivelled in his chair and wore a tired look on his face. "I could call that the good news. When the humans fought their war, they left no one behind to run their nuclear fission plants unattended and thus far at least thirty reactors have melted down and this has sent radiation levels soaring in some areas of Europe and America."

"I could say tragic but that just sounds like a cliche." Azula said sadly.

"We have learned to adapt to our ice age," Karo said hopefully. "Perhaps the survivors can learn to cope."

"You keep looking at my bed," Karo said pointedly.

"The blond human," Azula asked patiently, "how did she end up asleep in your bed?"

Karo shrugged. "She didn't want to be alone."

"I see," Azula patted Karo's shoulder. "What next?"

"She wakes up, takes a shower and goes on with her day?" Karo answered. "Our anthropologists wish to conduct interviews but the ship counsellor hasn't yet approved it."

"What happens next to the planet?" Azula tugged on Karo's gold hair ornament.

Karo had a touch of sadness in his voice as he spoke. "It will take years for the dust to settle out of the atmosphere and until then it will reflect the energy of the Sun back into space. The survivors will face crop failures, famine and a complete shift in climate. It will be as if every climate zone on the planet shifted ten degrees north and it might tip the climate into an ice age."

Sam woke up to the voices of Karo and Azula although she had not fully awakened and their native language sounded like a harsh kind of German. She felt even more foul than she normally felt when getting up in the morning as the thick atmosphere of the ship made her sinuses and mouth feel dry and she had a foul taste in her mouth. She wondered to herself if these people even had a concept of a mattress, a down comforter or a duvet cover. Karo had a mattress she believed had come out of a granite quarry and nothing approaching a comfortable quilt built for snuggling.

"Where can I take a shower?" Sam growled.

Karo pointed to the door to the left of the small kitchen. "The washroom is through the door nearest the exit."

"Do you have toothpaste?" Sam asked as she dragged her feet to the shower.

"Yes." Karo replied. "Put the cap back on. Please?"

Sam wondered to herself as she entered the single unit shower and looked at a grey tankless toilet that reminded her of Japanese washrooms. She wondered what pitfalls could lie in something as simple as a washroom with a small grey shower, sink and toilet. The room proved cozy enough, brightly lit and seemed to obey the rules of terrestrial washrooms.

'At least these people can make a decent shower.' Sam thought to herself as a warm, fine mist sprayed from multiple shower heads giving off a welcome floral fragrance. She didn't even have to turn a tap on, adjust the temperature or hope her mother had paid the water utility. She merely had to step into the shower on the warmly lit floor, close the transparent curved door and the shower began. A panel sat at arms length and had a backlit color screen and a set of rounded knobs and buttons which she had guessed Karo used to set the shower. She figured she was using the settings the freckle faced cyborg preferred but it didn't matter since it provided a refreshing warmth. After a few minutes, the water stopped and gentle warm air filled the shower. It flowed past her as it was drawn into vents in the ceiling.

---

Freddie had found the ship online library and the vast repository of human cultural information gathered by past voyages and the multitude of probes sent to study the system. The archives contained maps, images, vast amounts of survey information and records of every radio broadcast intercepted in the last century. Freddie faced a new challenge. He had access to a computer network on a ship that probably outperformed the Internet by some exponential factor but he couldn't read the Kaitanni language so couldn't search it in an ordered fashion. He had discovered the reason they fixed the office chairs to the floor – they feared a frustrated computer user might toss them out a window.

Freddie could speak to the computer but like any search engine, it had very different ideas of what 'and' meant. He had come face to face with Kaitanni for the first time and realized he faced a real problem. He had taken Spanish but Spanish and English resembled each other in many respects. English and Kaitanni resembled each other about as much as a tomato plant resembled a redwood tree.

"Please tell me more about Kaitanni?" Freddie asked the computer.

"Do you mean the Kaitanni race?" The computer answered in a dull, somewhat bored sounding voice.

"The Kaitanni Language!" Freddie said loudly.

Carly entered the Freddie's room as he finished yelling. "What ya doing?"

"The Kaitanni speak many languages on Homeworld but the main lingua franca is Sasqvebi." The computer answered back. "Sasqvebi belongs to the Han family of languages and is an agglutinative language with ergative syntactic pivot."

"Tell me about the written language!" Freddie commanded.

"The written language or Chunikoyen consists of a system of 808 hieroglyphs and 216 symbols for syllables." The computer displayed a nicely typeset page of pretty looking symbols. "Do you wish to begin a series of tutorials?"

"No!" Freddie commanded.

"Have you seen Sam?" Carly asked drearily. "I checked her room and she wasn't there."

"I've spend my morning arguing with this thing." Freddie sneered at the workstation.

"Let's go look." Carly pulled Freddie off the office chair and he stood to his feet.

Freddie followed Carly out of his quarters and wondered if he really had to master the awful written language and if the average lifespan would provide enough time to learn it. He had expected a simple, logical and consistent language and a written language based on a few simple principles since he thought people that could sail the stars must have perfected writing. He had no idea what ergative syntactic pivot meant, but it sounded medical and painful. He had forgotten how much work the electronic translators had done to make them easily understood and how much work they did to make Karo and Azula understandable.

"Can you read the signs?" Freddie asked.

Carly looked at a door plaque. "I think the dots stand for ones, the bars stand for four or fives but I have no clue. The funny squiggly lines are funny squiggly lines." She pressed the button on the elevator. "Lets go find Karo or Azula."

"You found them," Azula smiled as the lift doors opened. "Sam was with us." She pointed to Sam. "She got a bit lonely and spent the night sleeping on Karo's bed."

"Sam!" Carly put her hands on her hips and glared at Karo. "That sounds like something your mom would do."

"Huh?" Sam sounded offended.

"She would sleep on my bed?" Karo sounded oblivious.

Azula tried to push forward and calm Carly down and force a jealous look creeping across Freddie's face from making it any further. "Can you let us off the elevator? Some poor engineer twenty levels up might be wondering 'What's holding up the damn elevator?'" Azula succeeded in clearing everyone off the elevator. "Anyhow it's not what you think. Karo doesn't sleep and he worked all night. I think Sam just got scared and wanted company."

"The Kaitanni Sun stands more of a chance of going nova before we settle this." Karo grimaced. The Kaitanni didn't have romance having long since replaced it with genetics and contract law. Karo's parents had decided not to marry their child off and so Karo had his genes tweaked to make him a eunuch. Azula's father had decided his son – Azula's decade and a half old brother – would succeed him so had Azula genetically tweaked to not have children and to not have interest in romance. This prevented scandals. It also meant that both of them had no clue about human romance and love. Carly tried to explain why she had thought what she had thought but it drew a blank look from Azula and Karo looked as if he had inhaled a fly.

"Excuse me but you're blocking the elevator," A middle aged man in green robes bowed.

"Excuse me." Carly said as she backed up.

---

"What do you mean that you have to 'service' Karo?" Carly had become fond of Azula and she had only seen a beautiful, slender woman with hair much the same dark brown as hers but that didn't mean she understood her psychology. She had kept herself from thinking of her as alien and yet now she had to face that alien nature. Azula had proven a kind and quirky friend who genuinely cared for her feelings. She had thought more than once that the delicate and refined Azula with her polite ways had come at the right time and made the perfect counter to Sam and her often crude manners.

"As you know, he has an artificial brain and that lies behind a fairly radiation resistant skull. He has his eyes and a set of gyroscopes and directions sensors which are not well protected and may have degraded or been damaged by radiation." Azula patted a heavy red cloth bag hung over her shoulder. "I'll test them to make sure they won't suddenly fail – he could go blind or fall down the stairs." Azula guided them into one of the common rooms and sat them down around a thing called a Pai Sho table. Azula invited everyone to sit down. "You won't see blood."

"I'll feel you rummaging around in my head," Karo picked up a red sack sitting on the edge of the table. "You have cold hands and I can hear everything you do."

"You're a princess, why not have someone else do this?" Sam asked brusquely.

"No. We grew up together and I need his advice." Azula held up a purple metal key that had faint grooved etched on it and she inserted it into a small hidden hole under Karo's queue. "His body can heal like any other but his cybernetic components like his brain and the systems hooked up to it can malfunction under extreme conditions." Azula turned the key and with a click the top half of Karo's head opened up and the top part of his skull slowly tipped over to the right on small hinges. Azula produced a tablet computer from the red bag. Everyone else looked at the white ceramic surface of Karo's brain. It gave off no light but had a variety of warnings printed on it as well as a set of holes with fiber optic cables coming out of it. Freddie had expected a light show but found himself disappointed.

"What happens if I touch it?" Sam asked Azula, "or poke it?"

"Nothing." Azula plugged a red fiber optic cable into a jack at the back in the exact middle of the strange brain. "He has a ceramic coating around his brain to keep his photons in, and others out." The cable locked into place with a snap.

Sam felt the brain which felt warm to her hands. She could see the skull cap with a thin metal coating on the inside, a white plastic liner and living skin and hair covering it up.

"Will you quit that." Karo yelped. "Azula, you will clean off my brain case won't you?"

"Sam!" Carly looked at the exposed artificial brain and felt kind of repulsed. "Please leave Karo alone." The brain case had the look of a very big electronic part with bar codes laser engraved on it and she found it disturbing that a personality could come out of such a thing.

Azula looked at the tablet as it spewed out details. Freddie looked over her shoulder and wished he could read their language as code spilled by.

"I have to replace your optical sensors." Azula looked at Karo. "They have signs of problems. Have you noticed streaks or image burn in?"

"Not yet." Karo replied dutifully.

"Try to locate the magnetic pole of this planet?" Azula asked. "The readout says your magnetic sensors and balance sensors are damaged." She quit looking at the tablet computer and looked around. "Freddie can you hold this?"

Freddie took hold of the tablet.

"Karo?" Azula asked kindly. "Shut down your eyes – please?"

Karo nodded.

Azula reached into the red sack and produced a small squared end screwdriver with a white handle. She pulled Karo's head back and pulled the eyeball back one after the other and pushed the tool into the back. "Blink okay?"

Karo blinked twice.

Azula handed to Freddie the old parts which weighed much more than he had expected. The eyes had a long metal piece at the back he had not expected.

He held the two balls in his hand and the warmth freaked him out.

"I have to replace his vestibular system." Azula announced.

"His what...what?" Carly looked at Karo expecting a bit of bad news since it had been the pattern. "Is he okay?"

"He's fine!"Azula asserted. "He needs his balance system replaced." Another click and a small metal part came out. "Hold this." She handed the part to Sam. "No worries – he will still be a male."

"You have more worries about that than I do." Sam replied.

"I can hear all this!" Karo reminded everyone. "I let Sam sleep on my bed – nothing happened. If something did happen I would have the crushed bones to prove it."

"You saying I'm rough?"

"I feel like I want to puke." Karo replied. "Azula can you speed this up?"

Carly patted Karo's shoulder. "This is a bit weird."

Azula held out the same strange tool which held an eyeball. She pushed it into the left eye socket and it clicked. She repeated this for the right eye socket.

"Can I initialize my vision?" Karo blinked. "And Sam touched my brain so will you please wipe it off."

"Wait." Azula looked to Freddie and pointed at a button on the tool she held in her hand. "Press here or he will hallucinate."

---

Carly found Azula in her favorite place in the botanical gardens feeding a very brightly colored parrot some silver colored berries.

"That was a bit weird," Carly sat next to Azula.

"Our parrots are very intelligent." Azula answered back. "That they know when I have Silver berries is a bit strange but well...bird brains."

"I mean how you fixed Karo."

"Karo can't be fixed," Azula tossed a berry to an eager teal parrot who gobbled it down whole. "Well he can't have kids but he's never been normal. I grew up with the fellow...bloke."

"Are you two in love?" Carly asked.

"No." Azula tossed another berry to the teal parrot who flew up and caught it in mid air. "We are best friends as you humans call it, why do you ask?"

"No reason." Carly sat next to Azula and leaned her head on Azula's arm. "I lost my world." Carly began to cry openly. "What did I do to deserve this?"

Azula patted Carly's hair. "Did you ever eat a baby?"

"I was a good person."

"You're a sweet person." Azula chose her words carefully as the translator in her ear had less than perfect software and Sasqvebi and English were unrelated languages. She held Carly close to her. "Random stupidity doesn't serve justice. My parents named me after a 'heroic princess' out of a tradition of stupid names for first born daughters. Later on I found out my namesake was a mad, mass murdering psychopath serving evil. I can't even squash a spider out of fear of hurting it. All I can say is that I'm glad I met you, Freddie and Sam."

Carly hugged Azula. "God punished me for being a rotten person."

Azula pondered this. "This God person destroyed your planet because of what again?"

"I must have done something bad to deserve this."

"On this I think I can honestly tell you that you did nothing to deserve this." Azula held berries in the palm of her hand and soon regretted it as parrots and a very pregnant lemur mobbed her hand to catch berries. "God either doesn't exist or treats the Universe like smelly garbage – He can't wait to rid himself of the responsibility for it."

"I can't help asking why."

"Oh..." Azula tipped her palm and berries poured from it. "So this God person killed seven billion souls to punish you – did he tell you this Himself?"

"Sounds silly I know."

"Any stupid statement can sound profound and meaningful if you attach some kind of religious aspect to it." Azula hugged Carly close with her arm. "What happened to your people breaks my heart. I find it difficult to believe that you had anything to do with it. I think sometimes that the Universe defaults to tragedy. I can make no sense of it myself and I know you feel sad."

"What is your planet like?"

Azula pondered this. "Homeworld has ancient cities and vast forests and I think you would find it beautiful. This garden reminds me of all the things I love about my home."

Two guards walked into the garden holding Spencer up in the air. "This human set off all the alarms on the fifth through the eighth levels." One of them explained as they dropped the shackled artist at Azula's feet.

"I went into the kitchen and asked for Canadian Bacon," Spencer looked up at Azula as she held Carly in her arms. "The next thing I see is a slab of smoking grey sponge and a bell goes off."

"You may go." Azula said as she dismissed the guards. They left Spencer on his knees and marched off. "Canadian why or what?" Azula asked Spencer. "You know our knowledge of human food is limited and we have no knowledge of Canadian anything. I was enjoying a conversation with your sister so you had better make your explanation spectacularly good."

"I wanted sliced ham," Spencer began. "The top part of the American Continent is a country we call Canada and they call sliced ham Canadian Bacon." Spencer made eye contact with a flying lemur. "Isn't that lemur fat?"

"She will have a litter any day now." Azula answered as she looked at Spencer. "I should explain that our food synthesizers don't really synthesize food – they deliver it based on what it thinks you want. This explains why I still make tea in a teapot from real tea leaves grown in this garden and why we have many plants growing in here to give us fresh fruit and vegetables. Our economy is a largely centrally planned one which explains the reason our spaceships are so reliable but our appliances suck. The system of Auroria Prime houses most of the factories for making consumer goods according to some kind of five year plan which explains why Karo once had a microwave that gave him seizures that made him loopy."

"What does it deliver when you ask for tea?" Spencer asked.

"It isn't that I can't get it to barf up a fine cup of tea," Azula explained. "It comes down to the effort and time it takes for the retarded software that runs the thing to ask you how you want the tea and whether or not you want honey, pepper or some other condiment with it. People have died of starvation talking to that damned thing."

---

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

---

The Empire of the Fire Nation

Chapter 3: The Voyage to Homeworld

Karo watched a storm move across the continent of Europe. Nuclear Winter had begun to grip the Northern Hemisphere of the planet. The Kaitanni had sent probes that flew over the planet and measured every detail and found the temperature had fallen swiftly. The dust thrown up by the huge blasts and smoke from vast fires had blocked out the Sun. Karo understood this at an intellectual level but the tremendous scale of the disaster made him numb inside. He stared out the window as the ship crossed the terminator from the daylight to night side of the planet and the vast storm covered Central Asia and Siberia. Vast flashes of lightning lit up storm clouds that covered an area the size of Australia..

Carly stood at Karo's door and watched the curious little man as he stared out the window. "Our world has ended," she said quietly.

"All things end," Karo turned to face Carly. "This was such a waste." He leaned on the ledge of the window. "As with all young civilizations, you faced dangers as you grew in power and knowledge. Unfortunately, those in power acted in haste and didn't let their wisdom catch up."

"What will happen now?"

Karo thought for a moment. "We will have to leave at some point. Our orders were to study a living planet and the Captain will decide to abandon the survey of a dead one and we will depart."

"What will happen to us?"

"You will have to chose," Karo spoke cautiously, trying to articulate emotions foreign to him in their intensity. "I suppose you face the choice of returning home and trying to survive or returning with us to our world. Neither choice will prove easy. Staying may mean a miserable and short life – but you may prefer to die at home. If you come with us; you will leave this place forever, never to return. You will find yourself among aliens and in an unfamiliar culture."

"What are our chances if we return to Earth?" Carly asked quietly.

"We could give you supplies and help but in the end; you'd have to fend for yourselves." Karo apologized. "I would give you maybe a one in twenty chance of surviving five years."

"You're that sure we'll die?"

"You have a number of allergies and have had asthma. If you had an allergic reaction; you wouldn't get the emergency care you need." Karo knew the radiation in some places on Earth could kill in under an hour and he knew he would never survive on the planet.

"What would you do?"

Karo patted Carly's shoulder. "I am Kaitanni and we are different."

Sam found Azula laying back on her bed with a set of optical leads running from a port in the back of her neck to a silver computer. She knew Karo had an artificial brain but had taken the witty, amber eyed princess as largely natural.

Sam knocked roughly on the side of Azula's door.

"Come!" Azula announced.

Sam stood over the reclining figure of Azula. "So you have an artificial brain?"

"An interface to allow me to access computer systems," Azula answered openly.

"We're not going home – are we?"

"An odd question to ask." Azula held onto the small bundle of wires as she sat up.

"Karo told Carly we wouldn't survive if we returned to the Earth." Sam placed her hands on her hips as if demanding clarification. "Will your people prevent us from returning for our own safety? Or perhaps you want us as specimens in a zoo?"

"Karo can't misrepresent the facts so Carly speaks the truth." Azula disconnected the wires from the base of her skull with a soft click that Sam found disturbing. "If you would rather go back, you should know you will likely die, but that is your decision. You face a worsening climate, no food or medical care and a constant threat from disease and radiation."

"Karo can't lie?" Sam sounded contemptuous.

"He can't misrepresent the facts." Azula answered pleasantly as she carefully rolled up a set of translucent cables tinged a soft, light blue. "He can get the wrong facts and relay them. In this case, sadly enough, he has the right facts."

"I can't live like this!" Sam said in some desperation almost ready to cry.

Azula sat for a moment clutching the cables she had once had plugged into her head and thought for a moment. She had led a sheltered life and it had never occurred to her during long lectures about the history of her people in the often poorly vented classrooms of The Royal Fire Academy for Girls that her civilization would end.

"I miss shopping." Sam said with a melancholy voice. "Do you ever get really stressed out and go shopping?"

"No?" Azula had never even pondered the idea. She had come from a well planned and well organized centralized society and it provided for the circumscribed needs of the people. Things came from suppliers based on her needs and at times when permitted, her wants. "I used to take long walks with Karo on his home estate and with my mother...I know nothing I can say will help you right now."

"What were you doing with those wires in your head?"

"I'm a princess," Azula began sadly, "and my mind is not always my own. I'm too important to have my thoughts and memories left without a backup. In the days before cybernetics, if I had an accident and died or had a brain injury then my family would be left without a daughter. In most families, this would prove tragic enough but in a royal family; it could cause political problems or disrupt the throne. Now I can die and I could have my brain rebuilt in a body cloned from my genetics or even better be given a new and artificial brain with my new body. I have to take time to back up my brain – if you will."

The Kaitanni had the capacity to manufacture sophisticated cloaking systems that could hide a ship the size of the Crimson Dragon from radar detection and make it difficult to detect in visible light. The Kaitanni knew cloaking proved of limited value and made no large scale use of such technology. As a ship or probe jumped from hyperspace into normal space – that is from compressed space into normal space – the universal speed limit governing normal space asserted itself and as something entered normal space, it gave off a surge of energy as a burst of high energy gamma rays. Any ship in the vicinity recognized this energy as the signature of something entering normal space. Any race capable of making jump engines knew of this effect and even a perfect cloak could not hide this effect.

---

The Hakuri did deploy cloaking technology as they sought to gain every advantage on the Kaitanni and to pursue any technology that might allow them even a small advantage over their adversaries. As Sam and Azula had their discussion; a Hakuri Admiral commanding a Hakuri battleship gave the command to cloak the ship and jump into normal space about five billion kilometers from the Earth. The Hakuri had sent probes and knew the Crimson Dragon orbited the Earth and they had a fairly good operational idea what the Crimson Dragon and its crew had done while observing the planet. The Hakuri crew knew the Kaitanni would detect their entry into the normal space but their cloak would make it hard to track their course and so the ship could lurk in the dark and watch while leaving the Kaitanni on board the Crimson Dragon unsure of their exact position.

The Kaitanni had not used cloaking on their capitol ships for another very good reason; cloaking consumed a vast amount of energy. The Kaitanni school of engineers decided that efficiency, stability and performance trumped the advantage of cloaking. Both races used nuclear fusion to power large ships but took very different design approaches. The Kaitanni used an artificial gravitational field to squeeze the fuel and extract the energy in the manner a star did. The Crimson Dragon had two huge of this type. This system couldn't run out of control as a loss of power would stop the gravitational field and the reaction.

The Hakuri used a scaled up hydrogen bomb. A nuclear fission reactor triggered the reaction in the hydrogen making fusion possible at the high pressures inside a magnetic bottle. The fission reactor pelted the high pressure fuel with neutrons and then induced fusion. The Kaitanni used fission reactors to power small, shuttles and interplanetary ships (although the liquid metal fast reactors the Kaitanni used never operated anywhere near the power levels of the Hakuri battleships).

The Hakuri jump engines kicked in and a surge of energy sped to the waiting sensors of the Crimson Dragon. The Admiral knew the Crimson Dragon would not receive the signal for many hours making it hard for them to find them while cloaked. As the ship cloaked, one of the four fission reactors driving the fusion reactor had a power spike and emergency systems cut in to prevent a meltdown in a huge reactor the size of a small island. The design didn't permit fast, real time control and the fission reactor detonated.

The sensors on the Crimson Dragon detected this event seven hours after it occurred. The sensor crew at first had no explanation for a nuclear blast of millions of megatons in the Kuiper Belt but as technicians looked at the data and the physicists examined it; they became convinced they had witnessed a jump accident on the rim of the Solar System.

Captain Tsung and Lady Waipa along with others took a few minutes to put the remaining pieces of the puzzle together based on data now streaming in from the sensors. Something in the spectrum of energy gave away the telltale signature of a Hakuri fusion plant.

"This means trouble." Captain Tsung held out his tablet computer as the data scrolled down. "The Hakuri will soon realize they have lost contact. Given the vicarious nature of Hakuri operational logistics and hyperspace communications – soon may mean within hours or days." Tsung knew the Hakuri traveled in combat groups and the next ship had probably arrived at or near the predicted point of the main ship; or even before it. "The Hakuri don't believe in coincidences and will blame us for the destruction of their ship or use it as an excuse to act against us."

An alarm rang out as Lady Waipa sounded stations. Red lights came on and sirens wailed to let the crew know the time to act had arrived.

"Engineering crew to the Engineering Decks. Prepare for jump on my orders only." Lady Waipa shouted across the command deck. She knew the Kaitanni had the better ships and crew but the Hakuri had more of them in this sector and had a shorter distance to come to assist. The two navigation officers began to query the computers for the best and fastest course out of this system. "Set course on full power on a heading of 097 by 230." This would grow the distance between them and the Hakuri disaster and give them a running start should a convoy have chosen this time to visit. This didn't mean they would escape unscathed. If the Hakuri suspected an attack, they might deploy around the solar system and jump at strategic locations around the Solar System. The Crimson Dragon could out run any Hakuri ship in normal space but couldn't ram through one.

"Jump in one minute!" Lady Waipa shouted at the navigation officers at their consoles below the catwalk her and the captain prowled.

"Ma'am! We have no course!" One of the officers protested helplessly.

"You will." Lady Waipa needed to head to a safe world which meant a rocky mining world called Kalipo 3 thirty seven light years away. The Kaitanni had a trading and military station orbiting that planet along with a consignment of Kaitanni military ships to guard that sector. She waited and then raised her finger. "Kalipo 3 and step on it."

Lady Waipa heard the engines hum and felt the deck plates rumble as she saw the intense blue fractal patterns of the jump field form over the ship. The field acted to bend the fabric of normal space and allow the ship inside the field to slip through into the maze of wormholes that made up hyperspace.

---

Azula held the fiber optic leads as she watched the fractal patterns of energy as the ship slipped into hyperspace. "Why have we jumped?" She said quietly as she stood up and handed the leads to Sam and walked quietly toward the window.

"Jumped?" Sam followed behind the princess and watched the strange psparkle of blue energy that characterized travel in hyperspace.

"We've left your solar system."

"Why?" Sam added more panic and anger to her voice.

"I wish I knew."

Sam found the understated calm of Azula and Karo a most aggravating trait. They had a minimalism in the manner in which they conducted their lives and lived out their emotions. Azula wore a serious look of concern on her face but she had stated the facts as she knew them and as Sam had discovered; she would not state a guess.

"What happened?" Sam followed Azula as Azula turned and strode toward the door.

"We've jumped into hyperspace – as I explained." Azula crossed her hands behind her back. "I don't know why and can't hazard a guess. I will have a few questions and then I will know."

Sam grabbed Azula's shoulder. "I thought you were in command here!"

"No..." Azula answered slowly. "I am what you call the sponsor of the trip but Captain Tsung and Lady Waipa make the command level decisions. Darwin didn't command the Beagle."

Karo rushed out of the elevator with a shell shocked Carly behind him. "A Hakuri ship tried to enter the solar system from hyperspace and had a reactor failure. We entered jump shortly after we received this information. What could this mean?"

"I don't have access to command level logs." Karo answered as they rushed along with Azula and Sam to the command level. "Hakuri reactors and jump engines have never proven completely safe and while rare, jump accidents have occurred. We banned their cargo and transit ships from crossing our space for this reason. They use border stations like the nearby Kalipo station to transfer goods." A major jump accident occurred only five years ago when a Hakuri cargo ship jumped outside of Kaitanni space along their shared border. The treaty from the last war required the Hakuri ships to seek permission before heading into Kaitanni space and even the Imperial adversaries found trade with The Fire Nation paid well. They could proceed to one of five stations once granted permission. The Kaitanni witnessed a massive nuclear detonation in Hakuri space but as they could not enter Hakuri space without permission and weren't granted any; they concluded the ship had come for nefarious reasons.

Karo knew the Hakuri investigated and blamed the Kaitanni for destroying a cargo ship, the cargo and the 53 lives. This led to a rise in tensions between the two races and the Hakuri had never completely accepted an accident as the cause of the disaster.

Sam decided to choke Karo as a means of obtaining an answer.

---

"I found a Calvin and Hobbes anthology in the remains of the old RV." Azula said with her characteristic calmness. "If you all die, can I keep it?"

"I have a title," Azula lay back on her bed, "but no power. I am almost certain you have similar positions on Earth. As far as I could judge; the President of the United States of America had a title and no power. Thus it should come as no surprise to any of you humans that my command to return to Earth should be ignored. Even less surprising that Lady Waipa would have us escorted to our quarters under armed guard."

"That's it?" Carly protested. "Sam! Let go of Karo."

"I was starting to black out." Karo grasped his neck. "I had begun to think strange things like how nice the color red sounds."

"You can't command the captain to turn around and head back to Earth and drop us off!" Carly grasped Azula's neck.

"Lady Waipa said no." Azula didn't sound upset by Carly's assault. "I may be the Princess of the Empire but she can still throw all of us in the brig. She chose to confine us to my quarters. Does choking me help you feel better?"

"No!" Carly cried. "Nothing will make me feel better."

"I found a kind of skating rink!" Spencer rushed in the room wearing a strange uniform.

"All civilized peoples have hockey." Azula added. "How did you find gear to fit you?"

"I found a set and used the replicator magnify function."

Azula looked at Spencer in the strange uniform. "You found the Agni Kai or Dueling Ring. We use it for ceremonies. No one duels anymore but with our sense of history and culture."

"The ship has left the Earth!" Carly pounded her brother's chest. "Don't you care!"

Spencer eyed the blue glow coming in through the windows. "Oh...I didn't notice. I was running around pretending to chase a puck." He looked at the face of her deeply unhappy sister. "Couldn't we turn around?"

"We asked." Karo said apologetically.

"They said no."

Carly looked at Azula. "Sam can pick any lock made by anyone. Could we steal a shuttle?"

"Yep!." Sam smiled with pride.

"I have a feeling you have your arm around me because you have a role for me in this criminal enterprise." Karo looked at Sam carefully. "One of the shuttles does have jump capability. We have a Sakuz 280 shuttle for reconnaissance. We're not allowed to use it of course."

"I hate to interrupt this criminal enterprise," Azula sat next to Carly, "but we have guards at the door, guards at the shuttle bay, security systems around the shuttle and any number of loud alarms to tell on us." Azula looked at Karo. "I have tried to teach you to lie! How can an intelligent being capable of understanding the most complex computer systems fail utterly to know how to lie."

"I have a directive to convey accurate information." Karo glared at Sam. "I've tried to lie and all it does is make me paranoid. I can't sleep and I get a sour stomach."

Spencer looked from the hall through a window out into the shuttle bay and saw guards on patrol.

"How do we get out of here?" Sam turned to Spencer. "The guards still there?"

"Yes." He answered.

Sam walked to the door which refused to open. "We need a way out of here."

"Service ducts!" Karo held up his hand. "They go everywhere."

"I speak from experience when I say I would like to live long enough to see my own home!" Azula felt that urge to choke Karo. This urge normally took the better part of a day to overtake her but this time she wished such a smart person would quit acting like a moron. She stood up from the bed and walked up to Karo. "The ship has hundreds of service ducts going to many unpleasant places. One wrong turn and we end up in the water recycling plant or being filleted by a fan. He should know that even if we could steal a shuttle and fly off to who knows where – we still need supplies like food, water, clothing."

Karo knew every one of the standard Sakuz 280 shuttle control systems but this ship had jump engines. The catalog listed it as the Sakuz 285RES 'Blue Spirit'.

"What makes this ship different from the others?" Sam leaned over the seat and spoke in Karo's ear.

"It's black," Karo answered, "and you should get your seat belt on."

"Don't make me turn on the Fasten Seatbelt sign!" Azula held her tablet computer. "Spencer puked yet?"

"Are we all ready?" Karo double checked the massive nuclear reactor. He had seen the results of one kind of massive failure in a metal cooled fast reactor and so made sure the bomb they all sat near would not do anything unforeseen. "Gantry crane has begun to lower us. Someone tell Sam to sit down because she's making me nervous."

"Lets get it on!" Sam fist bumped Carly and Freddie then sat down.

The black ship hung over the shuttle bay doors on the gantry crane. Karo found this part of flight in space the most nerve wracking: he had to rely on automated systems to open the doors, winch him into the docking bay and then let go once the outer doors had opened. If this sequence failed then things could become unpleasant. Azula sat to his left and he waited on a screen in front of him. The outer doors opened and a region of the screen went green.

"Switching to internal gravity," Azula touched the screen in front of her. "We have a go – releasing docking clamps."

Something over their heads creaked. Spencer felt himself floating for a brief moment. Nothing happened.

Carly sat quietly next to Sam and wondered why the Kaitanni liked that sad grey interiors and the red leather like seats. A quiet beeping fill the cockpit as Karo almost whispered something about ready to proceed.

"Have we left yet?" Sam asked in annoyance as she tried to see through the front windows.

Azula made an adjustment. "We have left quite some time ago. We're under the ship and Karo has begun to initiate the jump sequence." She paused. "We have to do this properly or we could get in trouble."

"What do you mean 'trouble'?" Spencer placed air quotes around the word trouble.

"We have to jump into normal space because we have to get our bearings so we don't randomly end up in the center of a planet or worse." Azula explained impatiently. "Navigating in hyperspace with precision is impossible." Azula knew a ship this small with a jump engine used a liquid metal fission reactor using force fields to confine the core of the reactor at pressures and densities nearly at the levels seen inside detonating atomic bombs. She had never heard of such engines causing much trouble as a failure of the computer controlled force fields would allow most of the energy to escape but it struck her that the Hakuri had similar confidence.

Karo had discovered the Blue Spirit was a cantankerous bitch. Overpowered for its size, inertial damping barely worked and he knew at best the passengers would end up with bruises as they emerged from hyperspace. He initiated the jump engines to return to normal space and a blow struck his chest. The blue fractal lines slowly faded and trailed the ship as it shook violently. Azula and Karo saw the typical pattern of stars emerge but the ship shook violently as it made the transition.

"We have a problem..." Karo spoke in that utterly annoying calm that annoyed Sam so much. She imagined a tsunami rushing on shore and Karo telling everyone they might get a trifle wet.

"So this is it?" Sam struggled against the restraints. "We'll all die in outer space."

"I can't program the jump engines to take us back to Earth." Karo replied. "Someone has placed a program into the navigation computer and locked me out."

"Can't you crack it?" Azula looked over at Karo's display.

"The Royal Espionage Service Encryption algorithms have never been cracked by man nor computer." Karo noted that whoever had locked him out of the Blue Spirit's jump engines had been programmed to engage in a quarter of an hour. "I could try but I fear it would take a long time."

"How long!" Sam gritted her teeth. She found Karo's uncommon level of calm in uncommon situations worthy of a punch to the face.

Karo remained silent for a moment. "Do you know how long it took life to evolve on your planet?"

"Four billion years?" Spencer asked.

"Add three more zeros to that number." Karo had expected the humans to have a less than accurate figure. He had heard some humans believed God made the Earth at 9:00 AM on October 4th 4004 BC. He doubted this but if it were true; God wasn't going to honor any warranty on the planet after what the humans had done to it. On any account, he had family albums with brown, aged photos of insane relatives which were older than this date.

"All right!" Carly undid her belts. "Where are we going?"

"Homeworld." Azula announced. "At least they're not blasting us into the galactic core or through a gamma ray burst."

"How long?" Sam gritted her teeth harder. "How long to get there?"

"Seven of our years...Well we'll experience only two of those years due to the time dilation effect of hyperspace," Karo had a growing premonition of harm as Sam glowered at him, "which is more like three of yours. This ship doesn't have the fastest jump engines in the catalog. Sam can punch me now."

"Will it help?" Spencer asked. "If Sam punched you?"

"No...not really." Karo slid down in his seat. "They planned for our long trip or rather the need to send spies to dangerous remote places. We have six cryogenic beds so we can hibernate all the way home."

Sam stood next to a bed that had a perspex door that sealed it like a casket. The ship had a small set of rooms including a kitchen, bathroom and cryogenic chamber below the cockpit. Sam didn't like this idea at all. She found herself on a ship to a world where pork had no meaning.

"You didn't even try to crack the code." Sam grabbed Karo as he opened his lips to begin the lectures on the principles of cryogenics.

"I could have tried," Karo pleaded, "but I know better than to challenge our spies."

"What does he mean?" Spencer asked Azula.

"People who pry into their affairs tend to wind up dead." Azula pulled Karo from Sam's hands. "Karo didn't lie to you and he couldn't lie to you if he wished to. His artificial brain can't handle lies so lets get ourselves ready for our trip." Azula spoke with surprising firmness in the face of a girl who could break her arm if she chose to.

"What if something goes wrong?" Freddie broke his long nervous silence. "We'll all be asleep and if the ship gets into trouble no one will be able to do anything."

"The ship will waken Karo if something goes wrong." Azula answered. "Now if Karo will do the honors – send us to sleep."

"Wait!" Sam held out her arm. "What if I need to whiz?"

"Oh!" Azula smacked her hand on her head in frustration. "In cryogenic sleep, your body hovers near the freezing point of water and you basically hibernate. This means you run at such a slow metabolic rate that you won't need to whiz or whee or whatever."

"The sooner we get this done, the sooner we'll reach our destination." Azula looked at Karo who began programming the six pods for their passengers. "Much of life merits sleeping in. Imagine these pods as an invitation to sleep in and never have an alarm clock wake you up. Karo? Have you finished programming the pods?"

"Almost."

"Will we age?" Freddie asked. "I have a girlfriend you see and well it won't work if I wake up too many years older."

"I'm your girlfriend you jerk!" Sam made a threatening gesture with her fists.

"Maybe guys age faster?"

"No!" Azula yelled. "You're so close to death, you won't even wake up with longer hair on your face! For me that comes as a new thing."

"Will I dream?" Spencer asked as he raised his hand.

"No." Azula answered tersely.

---

Karo sat up and shivered. The ship had woken him up. He could feel that the cold of hibernation had not abated and the ship's heaters had not yet kicked in.

"I must remind someone to have me dusted." Karo brushed a layer of dust off his shoulder. He looked around the cramped compartment. "I have no memory of anything that happened here."

Karo waited a few moments as his head cleared. He checked the leads in his head and pulled them off so he could move out of his coffin like box. Slowly his memory returned and he could remember they were travelling to Homeworld. He didn't think anything out of the ordinary since the ship was instructed to wake him up to check on things after every few months.

A beeping alarm sounded as the machine detected his leads had become detached. He pressed a button to silence it and slowly stepped onto the cold floor. He saw his friends flat-lining behind their perspex windows, dew having collected there. This meant they had not yet been revived.

"Lights!" He commanded as he tried to recall if he had been awakened before. The lights came on and he looked at the cupboards of the small kitchen. "I need a dust free uniform."

"We will arrive in the Homeworld System in under a day." The computer said in a cold male voice. "Exactly 6.85 years have passed so please adjust your clock to match mine."

Karo hardly noticed anything as his clock shifted forward. "Fire Lord Zuko still in charge?"

"Yes."

"What has happened to the Earth?" Karo held back a sneeze.

"The Hakuri seized it in a dirty little raid but we have an uneasy peace with them at this time." The computer announced. "They have assured us, they no longer have any interests in our space."

"How about my family?"

"Lady and Lord Zhao remain well. Your father resigned from the Foreign Service five years ago and both your parents eagerly await your return."

"What were they told when the Crimson Dragon arrived without us?" Karo asked. If he had asked a computer he would have expected a lie.

"I don't have that information." The computer voice answered. "I can only relay what information I have received and no one has told me anything other than that they eagerly await your return."

"Why haven't you revived Azula?"

"She is currently being revived. You have an artificial brain which buffered you from the effects of such a long cryogenic sleep. Princess Azula has a largely organic brain save her behavioral implants and so while reviving her is a matter of routine; it does take longer."

"And the humans?" Karo climbed the stairs to the cockpit.

"I have orders to wait until this ship arrives at your family estate in the Western Earth Kingdom until I revive them."

"Vyaznoyar?" Karo scratched his neck as he stomped across the passenger level. Everything was covered in a layer of dust and felt cold. Karo closed his hands around his mouth as he sneezed loudly. "We did have some award winning white wine from those vines..."

"Your father retired to pursue his interest in making wine." The computer chirped as Karo paused in the middle of the dusty floor and raised his hand in frustration.

"You have no answers and my memory has a fuzz over it. I'm going to take a shower, raid our stores, fetch a new uniform because I'm covered in dust and have my underwear riding up."

---

Vyaznoyar meant something like Land of White River. This didn't matter as much as the fact that the Zhao family owned a province in the Western Earth Kingdom the area of Norway. The Kaitanni sense of 'ownership' didn't mean the Zhao family held all the land in the province nor that they could sell it at a whim. It meant that at one time, they had drawn up the boundaries and owned a large swathe of land not under a city, owned by monks, the dead, Universities, charitable trusts or inherited by family pets, set aside for wildlife, contaminated or used by the military. This gave the Family Zhao land holdings in the province of Vyaznoyar totalling about one percent of the arable land.

This did not mean Lord Zhao had little political influence. The Western Earth Kingdom had fertile land, formed a key part of the vast industrial hinterland known as the River Countries and had some of the most populated lands on all the planet. Vyaznoyar lay on the South bank of the Vyaznoyar River and had as its capital the great and ancient city of Belorat famed for the ancient temples and buildings and having a great spaceport that supported a city population of fifteen million.

The shuttle passed high over the patchwork of fields, canals and cities as it shed most of its velocity to the atmosphere and the cloud of superheated air disappeared. Karo could make out the dark blue curve of the planet as he piloted the shuttle through the atmosphere. Still many kilometers up, the shuttle made a series of sonic booms that rattled windows and greenhouses below.

Karo sat in his cockpit chair enthusiastic about his return home after more than seven years away. Azula felt hung over and despite having the better part of a day to recover from the effects of hibernation; she felt like she had the flu and that her body needed more time to recover its rhythm and timing. She decided never to use cryogenic suspension.

As pilot and co-pilot, Karo and Azula had little to do as the massive air traffic control system controlled thousands of shuttled with millions of passengers flying the re-entry and take-off routes every single day. They did the work of guiding each craft to its destination and avoiding places like the ancient city center of Belorat which permitted no aircraft to fly over its airspace. The air traffic system flew each shuttle allowing manual control only in an emergency. Deviations from the flight plan resulted in jail or being shot down depending on the severity of the infraction. The hologrammatic display showed a set of yellow posts with distance measures projected as if they formed two rows on either side of an invisible highway. This showed the course the air traffic system was flying the shuttle.

---

The Great White River sliced the land. The Amazon had nothing on this wonder of nature for unlike the Amazon, the Great White River was also part of a huge canal system that reached into the heart of the Earth Kingdom Continent and formed an ancient waterway that if stretched out would wrap around the Earth with length to spare. Karo watched the boats and ships moving in neat lanes as the shuttle banked and headed south. He had seen the river from land and at ten kilometers wide, it looked like a sea more than a river. He could see the opposite bank from this height as the craft turned. In the distance, to the south lay the long string of ancient mountains where vintners had found the valleys so productive. Karo knew he was finally home when he saw the dark blue outline against the high white clouds.

"Finally!" Karo muttered the name as the range of round, tree covered peaks grew larger. "I wouldn't believe I had come home until I saw those peaks."

"Don't get maudlin." Azula still felt the effects of the revival process and had a headache that receded all too slowly and tried her patience.

The Germans had a Bavarian King in the last half of the nineteenth century – King Ludwig of Bavaria who had sponsored Wagner and built a Walt Disney like castle complete with parapets and slender towers. Neuschwannstein had nothing on the castle that stood on a rocky copse in the middle of a mountain valley with fields of vineyards. King Ludwig and Karo's ancestors had the market cornered on bad taste.

The green vineyards flowed past as the ship sped down the valley dominated by the fantastic white castle.

The Zhao's hated owning the thing but they enjoyed the revenues the vineyards brought to the family. In the red rock cliffs below the castle, a set of metal doors slid open. Karo briefly thought it sad the humans in deep freeze in the deck below had no chance to witness this. The yellow holographic posts vanished as the air traffic control inside the castle took over and Karo saw a red square with green dots converging on the opening doors.

"Why can't we live in a big box made of structural steel with all the space we need to hold our stuff?" Karo asked Azula.

"Your ancestors couldn't pelt the peasants with cannon fire or boiling oil when they rebelled if they built a cube." Azula replied. "Sometimes, the peasants would rebel so your anscestors had to build this castle."

---

Carly had felt sick. She had contracted the flu, suffered asthma attacks and had numerous sleepless nights from sleep apnea. A young man tended to her as she lay back in a bed in a large room with a red stone ceiling made into a vault. She ached and wanted to vomit and the young man tended to her and paid attention to a bank of machines with cables that ran into countless sensors attached to Carly with thin needles. She lay back on a red velvet sheet over a mattress that felt like it made some effort to adjust to her comfort.

Carly could hear Sam moaning but couldn't turn her head to see her as her neck hurt far too much.

"You know," Azula's voice rang out through the large stone room. "We need a manual or a smarter computer. No one told me or the brains of the operation that humans could develop an addiction to the opiates we use to induce hibernation."

"How much will the hospital bills cost?" Freddie's voice rasped as Azula passed his bed.

"Our insurance covers the costs," Azula picked up the tablet computer attached to his wires and he winced as they pulled on the barbed contact leads in his chest. "We had no idea your people could become addicted to our tranquilizing nanobots. You landed eight weeks ago and we kept you asleep until a short while ago because you all underwent withdrawal symptoms."

"What happened to Earth?" Freddie asked from his bed on the far side of the room.

"Planet of the apes." Azula said as the young doctor followed behind her. "In the seven years since we left Earth, the Hakuri swept in and took over the place."

"Why do I feel like my mom after one of her nights?" Sam rasped.

The young doctor turned and faced Sam and Carly as they lay back on their beds. "The cryogenic system uses nanobots which hook into and suppress your brain and also protect it from low temperature and low oxygen. We had no idea they would bind so strongly to other sites connected with pain and pleasure in human brains. You became addicted to them and when we revived you and flushed the nanobots then you became ill and very psychotic."

"Nanobots?" Sam asked weakly.

"Small machines programmed to travel to one area of the brain and act on it in a controlled fashion. In this case, they induced a deep coma." The doctor examined Spencer's rack of equipment and made small adjustments. "We hope you all will recover in a short period of time. We saw some evidence of anomalies but they may heal in time." He turned again to face the rest of the room. "We can fabricate implants to fix these if you do not recover."

"We are sorry." Azula added. "Small differences can add up to big problems and we had to keep you unconscious while we tried to figure these things out. We found our sedating nanobots affected you like the sap of the Hadaki Cedar which secretes opium. The bugs get stoned and die. We didn't know you responded to opiates or that our nanobots would have induced this effect. We use the sap and its sysop to flavor things."

Carly had heard the string of scrambled sounds coming from Azula and the doctor but she had clearly understood everything in spite of hearing fairly exotic sounds. "How can I understand your language?" She made a loop with her fingers around her ears.

"While you lay in an induced coma, we had a telepath arrange your thoughts so you could produce sentences in our language." Azula leaned over Carly. "Not at all easy but while you have an accent, you speak acceptably."

"What are we speaking?" Freddie waved his hand weakly. He had spent time mastering Spanish under pressure from his mother and found it hard work despite the fact it was related to English. He could think in this language, speak and understand it but it in no way had anything in common with English or Spanish. Freddie found himself placing the verb at the end and pasting endings onto it to refer to what did what to who and when. He knew this language had no pronouns and he found it a pain not to have a way to explicitly say I want, but somehow this all got attached to the verb at the end. The language had found one way to hold the listener's attention.

"Fine morning!" Azula said casually as she walked with Carly between the long, endless rows of grapevines. "You look much better today."

"I figured out why your people wear so many clothes." Carly rubbed her shoulders.

A hum came from down the rows as a green and yellow painted tractor guided itself along the rows and mowed the grass. Azula paid it no mind but Carly thought it looked like a rather mundane and rudimentary tractor although it had no driver.

"It gets cool here late in the summer. I prefer the Capitol because its warmer." Azula gently patted Carly's shoulder and they stood to the side as the small tractor hummed past towing a set of mower reels. "Karo's father loves this place. I suppose making wine and keeping half the Empire plastered has its rewards."

"I had expected things to look more 'outer spacey' with strange plants and funky round buildings made of plastic." Carly brushed off the grass clippings from her vest. "The tractor looks like a tractor and the grapes look like grapes and trees look like trees."

"Evolution seems to follow the same patterns on many worlds. We would love to know why. Tractor evolution appears to have even less variation." Azula began walking down the slow slope of the vineyard. "Perhaps the Universe has a conservative streak or lacks imagination."

The valley the Zhao's owned reminded Carly of some parts of Eastern Washington. The mountains had dark blue trees with needles and the red and orange striped rocks stood out and reminded her of places she had seen in Utah. It was a very beautiful place not looking at first like anything alien. The bright blue morning sky and the cool air felt familiar but the small insects daubed with blue and red and the birds didn't look familiar. A flock of silver feathered crow like birds flew overhead while they whined and squawked in some occult language.

"They won't hurt you." Azula said as she watched Carly staring up at the birds flying in tight loops heading to their roosts in the trees of the mountains.

"Hard to take this all in." Carly looked around. "I'm on an entirely different planet."

"You're also taller than most of us." Azula turned back to face Carly. "Late at night when you walk to your quarters, I can hear your feet stomping on the stone floor of the halls of the castle."

"Sorry." Carly blushed. "I have trouble sleeping. I feel lonely. Freddie and Sam have each other and my brother Spencer had gotten distracted by all these new things."

"I have seen Freddie and Sam kiss and it made me queasy. I told them to keep their mucous membrane contact to a minimum as our people may find it disgusting." Azula picked off a grape leaf and began folding it. "At least they can't have children."

"I see." Carly nodded. "You know they may want to have a family one day."

"We anticipated that and had them sterilized. They still have all the normal feelings your people praise in most of your music, poetry and ads but they can't have a family until they get permission"

"Isn't that unethical?" Carly protested.

"I find myself a bit out of touch with your ethics." Azula played with a small bird she had folded from the leaf and looks uneasy. "Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission?" She looked at Carly for approval and found none. "I don't make these decisions."

Carly had grasped at long last one of the things that made Azula and Karo and their people so alien. They led controlled lives devoid of heartbreak or risk and as she looked at the ancient castle in the distance, she realized this was never going to change. The castle had existed for centuries and she saw no signs of remodelling since these people were averse and fearful of change.

"Uh..." Azula tossed the leaf to one side. "I didn't want to make you angry."

"I'm lonely," Carly sniffed. "I wanted a boyfriend and a family and a wedding gown and all that stuff one day. I suppose you don't understand that."

"Not at all." Azula said with her trademark candor. "I'm your friend so I have a duty to try understand these things. If you do find yourself wandering the halls when you can't sleep, why not drop in on Karo or me. We suck at feelings and counselling or therapy but Karo never sleeps and I have a sense of humor."

---

The castle had central heating but Carly found the stone arched hallways and the old interiors bleak and cold. The hallway had hanging lights with dim bulbs arranged in a circle and they did little more than act as a night light. Carly had walked the endless halls of the castles and seen frescoes of what she judged to be historic scenes. Frescoes decorated the halls with scenes of the Kaitanni in ancient times settling scores with their old foes. Suits of armor, painted red and black stood in nooks; one facing the other across the hall. She had seen one pair wielding swords and another with maces.

"Karo?" Carly knocked on the large wooden door that lead to his quarters. "May I come in?"

"It's open," Karo's friendly voice came through the door: "Can't sleep?"

Karo sat on the foot of his huge bed leaning forward watching a holographic program of some sort. Carly found Karo such an ordinary sort, it still surprised her when she saw the kind of opulence he lived with. His bed could have comfortably housed four people if they had made the red silks and linens into tents. He had a wardrobe made of some exotic deep red wood with gold dragons on the four doors that could have hidden a minivan and he had a rich and warm red rug on his floor while a sparkling chandelier lit the room with warm white LED lights. She stood at the door for a moment as she saw the mirror image of the Kaitanni Television Network equivalent of the closing credits of a program in mirror reverse.

"Hi." Carly waved. "Do you have a pool?"

"We do but I can't swim."

"So?" Carly twiddled her thumbs.

"What can I do for you?" Karo snapped his fingers and the display faded and then vanished in a flash of white light that formed a small cross. "I didn't expect visitors."

Carly shivered because Karo left one of the two large wrought iron windows that let daylight into the room open to let in fresh air. "I can't sleep." She looked out the window but saw nothing but blackness. "Do you ever get lonely?"

"I don't know." Karo stood up and motioned for Carly to take a seat in one of the fancy overstuffed chairs. "I have had family and people around me. In recent weeks I have had to make an effort to find time to spend by myself."

Carly sat down in a very overstuffed chair. "I tried to be a good person. Why has all of these bad things happened to me?"

"The Universe has an uncaring and deeply pitiless nature." Karo sat back down on his bed. "The difference between good and evil people comes down to one thing. An evil person never wonders why others punish him, but rather blames them for his lot. A decent person wonders why they have been punished and what they did to merit such unpleasantness."

"I guess I'll know what that means when I grow up." Carly looked at Karo. 'They have such amazing eyes' she thought to herself. She had come to admire the colors of the Kaitanni's eyes – deep pinks and glorious blues, teals, green and amber. She had even seen white and silver. She wondered if this was natural or if the Kaitanni had done something to enhance the rainbow of rich color in their eyes. Karo had artificial eyes but his looked so human and they conveyed his charmingly understated and polite calm very well.

"You look like you have something on your mind?" Karo asked. "I know you've been deeply unhappy. A Kaitanni prides himself on his loyalty to his family. On our world, we can adopt you into our family. If you want, you could become a member of our family."

"What about Spencer?"

"I caught him running in his underwear through the vineyard yesterday." Karo smiled. "My father shook his head and my mother wondered if he would get cold in those boxers. I talked about this with my parents and they want to help you. If you can't go home; having a name like Zhao will take you far. You could have a place and adopting our name would mean you could attend University and do what you wished within limits."

Carly lurched forward. "No home then?"

Karo held off for a moment as if this mattered. "Why was he streaking?"

"He's artistic?"

"We have a centrally planned society – artistic types can get into trouble." Karo never hinted at humor but Carly knew he had a sense of humor that was subtle. "My father had a few questions for me about his conduct but I told him Spencer was harmless."

"I still feel sad." Carly said in a voice that Karo could tell ached with pain.

"All that is good and fine in life has fled from us, never to to return." Karo replied. "I knew very little of your people but I remember a human piece of music from a composer known as Mozart. My father gave me a flute; a child's toy but the first tune I learned on it was Mozart. I have wished so much I could cry for you and your people." Karo wrung his hands. "All that is good and fine in life has fled from us, never to return. I have lost my innocent belief that the Universe would turn out in the way it should. You have lost the same thing."

Carly hummed a tune that she had learned as a child and had always stuck in her head. A fine tune by Mozart that Karo had played on a bamboo flute. Karo looked at the ground deeply moved.

---

Chapter 4: Chapter 4

---

The Empire of the Fire Nation

Chapter 4: Sibling Rivalry

"I have a deeply held belief that the Spencer artist is not entirely sane." Azula spoke from behind a pair of binoculars. "You have second thoughts about having him as a brother?"

Spencer darted among the rows of vines as if he had a purpose and Azula could not figure the purpose out.

"Carly respects him." Karo had no need for binoculars as his eyes had a zoom function. "I have to admit I have a soft spot for Carly. His brother is 'mostly harmless' and if he does become too artistic; we can find him a post as a civil servant."

"How did you know I had hidden in your wardrobe?"

"I heard you shuffling in there." Karo smiled. "As your closest friend, I have come to know you well." Karo patted Azula's shoulder. Azula didn't snoop on him but one of her mild acts of rebellion included hiding away in small places to spy on people. She had no reason for doing this but espionage somehow made her life complete. "We share a long history."

"Why does he run through the fields in his boxers?" Azula adjusted the binoculars. "Even for a madman; his behavior is a trifle off."

"I would love to know the reason for that myself. Psychologists might explain it in terms of something in his childhood or an unfulfilled longing for freedom that expresses itself when he runs through the vineyards in his boxers." Karo had always held the opinions of psychologists with some contempt as they often charged a huge fee to tell a patient the bleeding obvious but masking it in psychobabble. "Since we all live with some of the wishes in our lives unfulfilled but very few of us run through fields in boxers; this theory leaves something to be desired."

"Have you been keeping an eye the humans?"

"I'm not my primate's keeper and I didn't volunteer for that duty." Karo paced in front of the window nervously wringing his hands.

"One of them stole a gun." Azula said calmly. "I had known this some time ago but I hastened to report it to you. I feared you might overreact."

"Let me guess. The insane blond haired one!" Karo threw up his hands in frustration as he saw Sam walk through the courtyard of the castle with a period piece Fire Nation rifle. He grabbed Azula and pointed her towards the action. "The insane butch chick with the nerdy boyfriend has a gun? You think that watching her shoot things constitutes keeping an eye on them!"

Blam!

"In an empirical sense? Maybe I have a scientific interest in natural human behavior. " Azula said sarcastically. "She went out with a rifle to find food." Azula said with an unusual calm. "The twin statues of the riflemen in the lower hall are no longer twins. One of them has a rifle and one of them is missing a rifle."

Blam!

"Did you do anything to stop her?" Karo asked. "Did you consider telling someone?"

"No. I didn't know those statues in the hall had working firearms. Evidently they do so now we know." Azula pulled the binoculars to her eyes. "Do you know that marble gargoyle on the southern tower?"

"No?"

"Good." Azula said. "You won't miss it then."

Blam!

"Or its twin."

---

The Great Hall had a table that could seat fifty guests. Freddie didn't care about the huge wooden table made of the best woods or the stone floor made of the finest gray marble or the history of the hall and the generations of Karo's family that had entertained guests. The sunlight of the day streamed through stained glass windows which depicted fanciful scenes and whimsical monsters. He found the really sophisticated and superb home theater system both exquisite and beyond what he had ever witnessed even in the best cinema on Earth. A hologram floated above the table and music seeped from the stone walls and blended to create a perfect experience even if what he heard was a Kaitanni Symphony Orchestra playing a Russian sounding military march. Freddie held the slender silver remote that acted like a pointer and let him select different channels of music and combine them with visuals of astonishing beauty.

A stern looking man with a white goatee and a monks fringe with a few white hairs strung out in an obvious comb appeared in the Great Hall. He wore the red robes of an important noble and had the bearing of someone regal and important. Freddie turned off the display and the music.

"I retired here to have some measure of peace and enjoy my life." The man approached Freddie and the sunlight colored by the huge stained glass windows danced off his face with vivid sparkles. "This morning I went to attend to my bees as I always do."

The man looked important and very angry. Freddie decided it best to say nothing but sensed Sam had a place in the events the stern man was about to recall. Freddie could see some of the Zhao family resemblance in the man's face.

"Someone took pot shots at me with an old relic of a rifle. This proved quite surprising as no one has my permission to use weapons let alone an ancient relic which to my knowledge hadn't any ammunition. The bees found it very distressing when a round hit one of their hives. I had a full beekeeper's outfit but needless to say I didn't fancy being shot at so I ran for cover."

"Sam?"

"The blond haired girl." The man stated. "The guards found her in a tree trying to blow away birds. Lucky for us, the rifle only has a ten round magazine and even luckier that we still have dark, dank cells to keep her out of the way."

"Sorry?" Freddie said as he raised his eyebrow.

The man eyed him over as if to make Freddie sweat a bit more. "I am Lord Zhao to you!"

"Lord...Lord Zhao?" Freddie stuttered.

"Indeed." The man tossed Freddie a ring of keys and Freddie caught the heavy ring in his hands. "I had your friend locked to kimchi pot in the basement. You may go free her but keep her out of trouble and away from antiques or decorative statuary. With the Fire Lord due to arrive in a week, I want things to go perfectly."

"What is kimchi?" Freddie asked Azula.

Azula held out her table computer. "You sent me a message that you needed urgent help. That urgent help involved fermented spiced cabbage? Go ask the family doctor for something for your gas."

"Sam took out a hive of Lord Zhao's honey bees and so Lord Zhao has stuck her in a room tied to a kimchi pot." Freddie explained desperately. "I messaged Karo to help us search the basement but he hasn't replied. Do you know where he is?"

"In the laundry room doing laundry." Azula placed her tablet computer in the pit of her left arm. "We have servants but he insists on doing his clothes because he thinks the servants will steal his boxers. He's always been a trifle odd in small ways."

"Lord Zhao sounded angry and I really don't want to bother him." Freddie begged. "Do you know where we might find Sam?"

"Attached to a stone cabbage fermenting jar."

"And where do I find that?"

Azula shrugged. "I hate kimchi and have no clue but I have an idea where to find the man who does. Follow me."

"Where!"

"To help Karo fold his boxers." Azula pushed Freddie ahead of her. "Down this hall until you pass the dragon themed stained glass windows and a left."

"Someone texted me about – what is kimchi?" Carly held out a tablet computer as she approached Azula and Freddie.

"Fermented cabbage." Freddie answered and shook his keys. "Sam attacked Lord Zhao's bees with a rifle and Lord Zhao had his guards lock her to a kimchi pot. We have to find her and free her."

---

Karo sat in front of the washer and watched carefully. Kaitanni washers like the ones from Earth had a clear front door, a metal tub that filled with warm water and used detergent. The servants did the job of washing the laundry and in no way did the nobles believe in easing their lives by applying high technology to the problem of cleaning clothes. The Kaitanni did make their washers available to everyone in a choice of silver, white, gray, red, mustard yellow and olive green. Karo sat down in front of an olive green washer with bright silver knobs and a dryer that looked much the same.

"Karo!" Freddie shouted and tapped his tablet computer. "I sent you a message."

"I could never solve the problem of fractal patterns in laundry. Either the problem of predicting where a pair of boxer shorts will end up at the end of the spin cycle is too complex for mortals or would take the theoretical life of the Universe to compute. Instant messages won't reach me in the basement." Karo stared at the laundry whooshing around in the stainless steel basket of the washer.

"Sam took a rifle and shot out one of your father's beehives." Freddie explained urgently. "He threw Sam in a room full of kimchi pots and gave me the keys."

Karo didn't turn to face Freddie as he spoke. "Does she think by killing my father, my rule will make a difference when I inherit this place? Why involve me in Sam's indiscretions or in her love of cabbage."

"Where do we find kimchi in the vast cavern of a basement?" Carly asked in a calmer tone. "Azula couldn't tell us."

"Oh very well." Karo stood up. "Follow me."

---

"The mail came!" Azula yelled as she stormed into Karo's room as he read a book on his tablet computer. The Zhao's received mail deliveries in the morning and afternoon and the afternoon mail was due to arrive but Karo hadn't expected any mail. "The servant gave me your mail. You have a catalog from the GUM department store. I have a letter from my mother." She tossed the magazine at Karo and it landed beside him on his bed.

Karo looked at the magazine. "This is for garden equipment."

"Soon you and your dad will be side by side working the fields and making wine." Azula broke the red wax seal on the envelope and opened the parchment colored paper used for official palace correspondence. "You'll need something to read."

"I went out with my dad yesterday. I saw a huge bug." Karo put down his tablet. "I now have the job of watching the humans. My father was less than impressed by Sam's rifle rampage. He likes his gargoyles symmetrical. He told me in no uncertain terms that he doesn't wish to see humans on a rampage on his estate. I had to break the news to Spencer to jog in his clothes. Now at five in the afternoon I can relax."

"Brace yourself." Azula held out the letter. "My brother will come to visit us in one week. My mother wishes to visit me."

"A split second is not bracing time." Karo put down his tablet on his bed. "A split second is the time between the time you realize you've fallen out of a fifty story window and you're bladder releases." He backed up and sat against the headboard. "He picked a poor time. My dad will have to get all of his grapes off in the next few weeks. I will have to help my mom and the servants prepare and find some way of keeping the more reckless humans out of trouble, out of ammunition and in their clothes."

"I phoned my mother." Azula sat on the edge of the bed facing away from Karo. "I don't do formal visits very well. Do you know how many days we have in the year?"

"Leap or normal?" Karo asked.

"If we had all of our ceremonies on consecutive days; we'd take five years to get through them all." Azula exaggerated but not by much. Fire Nation traditionalists had a ceremony for each royal occasion including a dozen tea ceremonies and even one to bless an automatic lawnmower when it went into service. The Lawn Mower ceremony had descended from a ceremony to bless sacred swords but now involved a petition to the spirits to protect the appliance from ingesting flip flops.

"You are in what your people call the doghouse." Azula found Sam in the small wooden garden shed trying to figure out how to turn the sprinkler system in Lord Zhao's garden on full blast. "What I don't understand is why you only waited one day to exact your revenge. One Fire Lord waited until he was dying to have his brother beheaded. You have all the viscous scheming demanded by the best kinds of tyrants but you lack patience."

---

Sam had expected some kind of computer with a holographic display but found a set of mechanical dials. "How did you know what I planned? No one can prove anything."

"I noticed the garden shed door was open." Azula took one of the green plastic pegs out of the face of the dial and placed it back in the correct location. "Lord Zhao doesn't consider gardening a quaint hobby. He takes it seriously and not a detail goes unnoticed by him or his wife. They set these timers to come on at exactly the best time of day for watering and deliver the exact amount of water. He will know! Karo has no interest in gardening, I have no interest in getting dirty. Lord and Lady Zhao have the only keys to this shed and none of the servants are permitted to set foot in here."

"Good grief!" Karo exclaimed. "I saw the door open on this shed! I thought my dad had passed out or something."

"Sam wanted to adjust the sprinkler system for the castle – possibly to douse your father." Azula explained. "I told her the shortest distance between her head and her head on a pike passes through here."

"I know Sam has plans." Karo motioned them to leave the shed and then began to try to tactfully explain an unpleasant fact of Kaitanni life to Sam. "My mother is a telepath and still on active duty. Nothing goes on in this place without her getting vibes but she ignores them. The thought 'get that stuck up bastard and soak him 'til he pukes' did catch her attention and she told me to keep you from yet another entanglement with my father."

"I see you found her." The regal Lady Zhao put her hand on Karo's shoulder.

"Azula found her first." Karo explained.

"I dislike conflict, but with the Fire Lord visiting, we have much to worry about." Lady Zhao bowed in gratitude to Azula.

"Wait!" Sam shouted and pushed past Azula. "You can read my mind."

"I can..." The white haired lady said sweetly. "You have intense emotions and I could sense that first and like the sound of breaking glass, it drew my attention and I could sense what you had in mind."

"What will you do?" Sam looked down at the ground.

"Nothing." Lady Zhao said. "You might have thought my husband acted cruelly when he locked you down in the room with the kimchi pots but he had his reasons. I can read minds but since human minds differ, I needed to practice. I used the time you spent in that cell to hone my skills so I could read human minds. We have the Fire Lord visiting and we don't dare take risks. We didn't tell anyone because will I love my son, he has trouble telling lies and the effort causes him much suffering."

"So I'm a whacked out psycho?" Sam pointed at her head.

"Not as disturbed as some, more disturbed as others." Lady Zhao advised. "As a telepath, I can't judge: all telepaths are troubled at times. You have a troubled past but many of us do. You have a fierce temper and you have your flaws."

"What about Freddie?"

"Neurotic?"

"Carly?" Sam wanted verification of Lady Zhao's claim.

"A lonely young woman, unsure of herself. She very much thinks about home." Lady Zhao shook her head with a hint of regret and sympathy.

---

Karo picked up the slender silver remote which worked the music and holographic projection system. He selected a classical music program and sat on his bed with a bunch of colored paper clips and began listening to the radio and weaving a chain of the clips for the sheer mundane fun of it. He enjoyed the routine of his home. Each evening for many years, the state radio music channel had a program called 'Beyond the Score' which detailed a beloved piece of music and the life of the composer behind it. Karo had missed his favorite show during is tour of duty. Despite the fact he listened to the radio, this radio played back distortion free and perfect music with perfect imaging and totally impossible to tell apart from the real thing. Karo listened to the 7:00 pm News Fit and then to the commentator of Beyond the Score. One advantage of living in the Estate of Duke Zhao came in the form of the quiet evenings. The estate and the attached lands were 'no fly zones' and he never heard the sounds of aircraft interrupting his pleasant evenings of music and commentary.

Azula walked in the room and stood over Karo with her arms on her hips. "How many days until my brother shows up?"

"Four." Karo answered and weaved yellow paper clip into his necklace.

"Can I come in?" Freddie asked from the far side of the door.

"Is it urgent?" Karo asked.

Azula hid in Karo's huge wardrobe betting on hearing something interesting.

Freddie walked into the room. "How dare you let your mother eavesdrop on my girlfriend's thoughts." He pointed an accusatory finger at Karo who shrank back. "Don't you know that violates her privacy?"

"I sense some kind of symmetry in this since you breached my privacy." Karo muttered. "You are rather worked up."

"You bet I'm worked up about this." Freddie said angrily. "Your mother intrudes on my girlfriend's mind and so why wouldn't I be upset?"

Karo clutched at a defence. "I didn't know anything until this morning. Telepathic ability runs in my family but my mom wouldn't do anything unethical with what she might have known."

"Are you telepathic?"

"No." Karo listened for any sign that Freddie might have calmed down and found none. Karo had never had to worry about having a telepath read his mind but all of his thoughts consisted of binary impulses in a very fast computer. A telepath wasn't needed as any number of devices could read his thoughts; and he had no covert thoughts. Azula had mucked around with his memory and so he assumed anything in his mind and every memory or mental state could be made public. "I can tell you complaining to me does you no good. Telepaths serve the state and are somewhat above the ordinary rules and courtesies that apply to the rest of us."

"Don't you know Sam and I are boyfriend and girlfriend?"

Karo shifted uncomfortably. "We had a clue but that doesn't concern us save for the small detail that you won't be allowed to have children." Karo swallowed when he realized he had said something more offensive than anything that had gone on before in the conversation. "This conversation feels a lot like breeding dragons!"

"What?" Freddie sometimes had to take a pause as even with clear understanding, he often had no idea what Karo meant. Azula was even worse as many of her stories began 'in the days of old'.

"In the days of old, dragons filled the sky but they proved difficult to breed. Only careful observation told you the difference between the males and the females. They had a mutual hatred of each other and if you timed it wrong; they ate themselves or you. Even when things went right; the breeding involved the breeder, a good deal of force and several concussions. This explains why they went extinct." Karo explained his metaphor. "Like one of dragon breeders of old, I fear this conversation may end up with mild concussions."

Azula opened the door of the wardrobe carefully but the old metal hinges squealed. "I interrogated your socks and none of them know where that pair of boxers went. I have a theory the dryer acts like a quantum amplifier and expels your socks and underwear into hyperspace."

"Since you have listened in!" Freddie turned to Azula. "If someone read your thoughts and knew your deepest secrets; how would you feel?"

"What deep secrets?" Azula scoffed. "Karo knows my deepest secrets and I would imagine his mom has taken a peek. When I was about three, I ate a grasshopper. I felt I could do this because I had caught it and as the predator I could enjoy my meal. My mom had a fit as this took place at an important diplomatic reception held outdoors. I grew up as the sheltered princess and so have no life. Karo could have his mind scanned by the most powerful telepath and they would sense nothing since his brain uses a quantum computer that works off photons."

"I can see neither of you understand my problem." Freddie huffed.

"How can we?" Azula answered back quietly. "Neither of us can fall in love, get married or have children and we've been programmed not to care."

---

Carly didn't wish to go 'native' since she held out hope of returning home to Earth one day. So many things she had seen made her feel alien. She spent her evening searching the vast libraries of the planet for more information on the Kaitanni and about their ways. She knew they valued order and conformity. They valued such things even above free speech or privacy. Freddie and Sam still fumed about having their minds invaded by Lady Zhao but Karo and Azula had no apologies and had no grasp of why this would prove insulting or intrusive. She had befriended Azula and Karo but neither of them had understood the violation. Sam and Freddie had no appeals of any sort to redress such an intrusion. From the viewpoint of the Kaitanni; they had no cause for complaint as not even thought was private.

Like a Disney princess, she longingly looked out of the open window of her room in the castle.

The evenings on the planet had spectacular sunsets. She wondered whether the thick atmosphere or the special properties of their Sun gave rise to red, orange and green. She enjoyed the views of the vineyards from the castle and the villages for the farmers made of finely worked stone with red clay tile roofs. The nearest village had a population of a few hundred but she could not recall the name. Although only two kilometers away; she had not left the castle for a visit. The sun set over the distant ridge of mountains and from the north, the aurora began to flow. The planet had a powerful magnetic field and on many nights the skies lit up with gentle purples and blues tinged with ribbons of red and green. The moon had waxed since she arrived. A silver, perfect and bluish moon became visible as the sunset faded. Carly found this little planet quite beautiful but she felt not at all at home.

"Freddie is arguing with Karo." Azula announced as she barged through the door.

Carly turned around and looked back at Azula. "Karo doesn't as much argue as simply listen and try to avoid loud voices." Carly had wondered if Azula would learn to knock and decided that it would not prove worth the effort to teach her. Azula had become a friend but she was a princess and didn't think the rules of conduct applied to her.

"Karo plans to calm his feelings with meaningless anecdotes." Azula smiled briefly and then embarked on one of her wordy explanations. "He has a long list of them. Each one illustrates a lesson we learned about living as Kaitanni. He's worked up to the one about the wise man who taught the general about command by taking a sword and slicing the head off one of his female concubines. We frown on that now and I utterly forget what the lesson was."

"Such a cheerful people." Carly found Azula's humor difficult to grasp with its often sardonic, dark and acerbic, dry wit. This worked both ways: Azula never grasped the kind of slapstick embodied in iCarly. Azula's dry humor worked like a Mahler Symphony: it took time and effort to fully grasp but for the effort Carly received some pointed observations of the nature of life rattling in behind those amber eyes.

"We have had longer to observe the Universe than you. It always ends unhappily." Azula reminded Carly. "We have an old saying: In life the best thing is never to have been born, the next best; to die as soon as possible."

"You don't think life is a gift?" Carly asked back.

"Not all gifts are welcome or wanted. Most kids know this – ever get socks instead of that nice phone for Christmas?" Azula reached in her vest. "All intelligent races have paper clips and make necklaces of them. This defines intelligent as having a neck but never mind. No one knows why and you'd probably go mad if you knew. Anyhow Karo made a necklace out of them. I brought it with me to give as a gift for you."

"Thanks." Calry held out her hand as Azula dropped the paper clip chain into it.

"Feel better?" Azula asked and raised her eyebrow.

"Not really." Carly said doubtfully.

"Even a gift may not be welcome or appreciated." Azula nodded. "Enough of our wisdom. I came to ask if you wanted to go out for a walk." She picked at Carly's shirt sleeve. "The skies are the same dark blue as your academician's dress and we can walk to the village."

The night was cool but well lit by the aurora. Blue and red streamers flowed across the sky, growing dimmer toward the south. The Zhao's lived at about thirty degrees north but on this planet that was the temperate zone and the weather was like that in Wales or Ireland.

The narrow two lane road led from the castle to the village two kilometers away and served mainly to serve delivery vehicles. The center of the road had a familiar lane divided that looked like paint but emitted a soft white glow as the two girls walked past. Wind blew through the tall trees on either side of the road. They looked like Lombardi poplars but had larger leaves and darker bark and protected the delicate grape vines from the ravages of winter storms.

Neither girl said anything. Carly wanted to take in the alien yet familiar landscapes. Azula had wanted to walk with a friend and at the moment; she had nothing to say.

Carly had come from a large Earth city and had the unfamiliar experience of walking at night without threat from muggers or worse.

"We can have something to eat in the village?" Azula broke the silence as they approached an old arched stone bridge lined with trees and bushes.

The bridge looked as if it had always existed and made Carly aware of how much the old, the exotic and new mixed on this world.

"If you wish to have something to eat that is." Azula said almost apologetically.

"If we can find anything open." Carly smiled. Azula had tried to be a good friend and compared to Sam proved less problematic. Carly found Sasqvebi at times slippery and had to keep in mind her speech had to reflect levels of formality by using the right form of the verb. She found it amazing she could pick the one form out of millions so easily but this time she had spoken to Azula as if she were Sam. She crossed the bridge hoping the worst might be a grim grammar lecture. "Did I screw up that last sentence?" She asked timidly.

"Not that I could tell." Azula had paid less attention to how Carly had said something than what she had said. Carly had pulled off the sentence without any odd 'Englishism'.

Carly had discovered Sasqvebi didn't pose as hard a language to learn as Freddie thought. While a verb final language with free word order and endings for verbs and nouns; the language had few irregularities. Sasqvebi looked exotic but she realized the rules governing the order and placement of its endings proved regular once she knew the rules. She had problems because the verb took endings to reflect levels of formality from talking to animals to speaking with royalty. She sighed with relief that Azula had not even noticed much less took offence.

"If you worry about what you say, you'll never say anything worthwhile." Azula told Carly. "Content matters more to me than politeness. My brother takes all this 'royalty' crap seriously but I never saw the difference between me and you or Karo or most people on this crusty ball. I grew up watching my father and then after he retired, my brother take on the role of Fire Lord. This meant they wore five layers of clothing made by hand and played Emperor in countless fruitless ceremonies designed like all ceremonies to make you sweat and feel socially awkward. I spent my life avoiding diplomatic events and dodging appointments. I went on the Crimson Dragon mission along with Karo to escape."

"Why did your parents let you go on such a voyage?" Carly asked. "I mean a princess on a voyage of exploration? What job did you have on that ship?"

"The Crimson Dragon went to study and assess your race fully so we could make plans for future contact." Azula clasped her hands behind her back in a way Carly had noticed showed some nervousness. "My parents wanted me to take a grand tour of the Empire and grow into my role as a princess. I think they wanted to hide me. I know my brother wanted me out of the palace. I studied history and linguistics while Karo has expertise in programming computers. I did the work on your important Earth languages – Chinese, English, Arabic, French, Russian and Japanese so we could communicate more easily."

"Wow." Carly spoke with some awe as it dawned on her that Azula was very smart. "I couldn't do that kind of work. I'm not that smart."

"All languages work the same way under the hood." Azula watched the lights of the village, cars darting back and forth and the long shadows it cast on the ground even this far out. "English and Sasqvebi look so different. English has an alphabet while we use a mix of symbols and what you might call letters. You notice the differences first. You noticed Sasqvebi has no pronouns like I, you, we and so on, has free word order, has endings on verbs and nouns that change meaning in subtle ways like levels of formality. Languages work like houses. Houses look different, but they are permanent shelters that have bedrooms, washrooms, a common room and kitchen. They have some kind of underlying structure that is the same regardless of how different they look. Sasqvebi has words that work like nouns, words that word like verbs and words that work to add information and so does English."

"I'm not sure I caught all of that." Carly chuckled. Both of them walked to the side of the road as a van hovered along the road. It rushed toward the village with a quiet whoosh. Carly thought it looked like an old style Delorean with the gull style doors. The van shone its lights briefly on the girls and sped down the road.

"You don't need to." Azula said. "We came out to relax on a walk, not think."

"How do you get along with your family?" Carly changed the subject as she agreed she didn't want to think.

"I hate visits from my family," Azula kicked a loose stone down the road, "because I have to act like a princess."

They walked between two vast vineyards in silence. As they walked through the outskirts, Carly saw small stone houses with green tile roofs and tidy lawns. She had expected to see something akin to the more avaunt guard houses on Earth – domes or curved living places with huge interiors. These houses looked frumpy in comparison. They had neat lawns, nicely kept trees and looked like something between a Chinese and French village house. The streets were cobbled and the streetlights shone from fancy wrought iron and stain glass shades that gave the light a ruddy, red color.

"The pub is over there." Azula pointed to an arrangement of tables under bright lights at the intersection of the road and the main village street. The noise of voices mingled with the sounds of eating and drinking wafted down the street.

"I'm not old enough to enter a pub." Carly said.

"I have some pull." Azula said smugly. She knew pubs had no minimum drinking age as most people came to meet and eat. The Kaitanni had long found a way to rid themselves of the kinds of tendencies toward addiction so drinking never grew into a vice.

The pub had half a dozen tables with red, green and white umbrellas to keep the weather off lit by lanterns that hung off a post that protruded through the center of the table casting a warm glow and some warmth on the tables. Azula and Carly sat down at a heavy, round, wood table with four chairs next to a window box planted with red lilies. A set of pub menus rested against the center post and Azula picked two and handed one to Carly.

"Why don't I see all the high technology?" Carly sat in a chair across from Azula. "All the funky doo dads and things?"

"Look at the wall?" Azula pointed to the stone wall of the pub. "What do you feel?"

"Cold stone." Carly felt the wall as Azula sat down. She knew this would be another kind of lesson in some inscrutable aspect of Kaitanni philosophy.

"Would it be any better a wall if you made it out of carbon nanofiber?" Azula peered from behind the menu. "Would the wooden lintel over the big french doors be less able to hold up the door if it were some plastic or ceramic?" Azula waited for an answer.

"I guess not." Carly sat quietly. "So things don't change much?"

"Our languages change and people live and die." Azula placed her hands in a fist on the table. "Even before the Great Wars of the Ancient times, a great scholar – Lin Tzu in the old language – he planned out our society and he put everyone in their place. When the Fire Lords ruled the worlds in the generations after those Wars, they returned to the old ways to preserve social order."

"Uh huh?" Carly nodded and acknowledged what she had heard.

"Do you see the waitress who's ignoring us?" Azula turned her head toward a middle aged woman in robes similar to Carly's, but lilac not blue. "She could be a genius but she can't go to a college, she can't leave this planet because her parents belonged to the service caste. She never thinks of it because as we advanced, we found ways to manipulate people to have few aspirations. Genetics, cybernetics and social science are how we keep people in their place."

"What if she wants to do those things?" Carly asked desperately.

"You are what your brain tells you." Azula tented her fingers. "We shape the brain on every level so she couldn't want to. Do you want to be a sculptor? Do you want to be a plumber – the pay is good. Do you want to experiment on animals?"

"No!"

"Such subtlety." Azula motioned the waitress over.

"Good evening!" The middle aged woman spoke politely but struck Carly as healthy and happy. "We have fried dolphin prostate for your enjoyment and you have your choice of kimchi, fries or spiced mashed ash banana."

"I'll have the fried dolphin prostate." Azula nodded. "I would like fries and an ice bear urine soda with that."

Carly shivered. "Anything else?"

"The Komodo chicken fingers and a beer?" Azula suggested. "You could get a bottle of cherry Henwa Spring Water – the lithium makes it really nice."

"Any salad?" She asked. "Garden salad?"

"She'll have what I'm having." Azula motioned. "Dolphin sweetmeats have a flavor so exquisite you'll thank me later."

"Eww!" Carly winced. "I can't eat a rare marine mammal!"

"They're not that rare." Azula tried to assure Carly. "We don't harvest them anymore but use stem cells to make the sweetmeats. No dolphin was – as you say – harmed in the making of this dish. It may be a bit rich and fatty for your tastes but nothing wrong with a little junk food."

"I don't know..." Carly shook her head. "Junk food?"

"One serving isn't bad for you." Azula smiled.

"Is that Spencer behind that lamppost?" Carly thought she had seen a lean tall man duck behind the post.

Azula looked at the post across the intersection which had two hanging baskets of flowers. She saw a slender figure in artist caste clothing trying to hide behind the painted iron pole. "What would your brother be doing here in his purple robes and not in his boxers?"

"Psst! Carly!" The figure whispered.

"Spencer?"

"Yes." Carly answered. "Why are you here?"

"They're everywhere." Spencer said as he came out from behind the post, looked both ways and crossed the street. "Scary military people all over the castle. I went for a walk and found them guarding every hall in the castle. I wanted to see Karo and find out where the 3D copier was in that place and they stopped me!" He reached the table and took a seat. "They told me no mere actress could visit the Royal Wing of the Palace!"

"What Royal Wing? The palace has a garden shed, a hall, a gallery and no royal wing." Azula asked. "That confirms that my brother will arrive in a few days. Those guys are his own little secret service and they can hurt you bad. They make a career of it." She rubbed her chin. "They're trying to make the Zhao estate like the Fire Lord's palace with all the rules. Anyone want to hop a passenger shuttle and as the humans say: Get out of Dodge?"

---

Karo scratched his head. "Why do I have to give up my room?" He wanted to add the phrase 'military jarhead' but he valued an unbroken pelvis. "We have guest rooms."

"Lady Mai needs a large room for herself." Despite the fact he had command of security, Karo still held a much higher title.

"I met Lady Mai as a child and she didn't strike me as the kind to want a fuss made over her visit. She wouldn't deprive me of my own room. Even my parents kept it neat and kept all my things the way I liked them." Karo paced his room fuming. "Where do you expect me to sleep?"

"You can sleep where you wish – just not on this wing of the palace." The man replied with feigned confidence. He knew Karo and Princess Azula were best friends and he had met Azula. To call her a difficult and outspoken person made her seem pleasant by comparison. The guard decided to take another tack – marketing the idea to Karo. Given that the palace had countless bedrooms in the other wings, Karo could find a similar room in the servant wing or in the wing where his parents lived. "Prince Zuko will be grateful to you and we'll make sure he knows you gave up your room to his wife."

"That may be so but what about all my things?"

"We will put them into storage." The guard replied pleasantly. "Nothing will be damaged."

"She will change all the settings on my hologram projector and all my favorite music stations." Karo protested again.

"You won't receive any music programs during the Fire Lord's visit." The guard answered.

"The Fire Lord has some kind of migraine?" Karo tried his best at sarcasm but the engineers of his software had made him far to agreeable.

"As security protocol dictates, we have to monitor all outgoing and incoming communications."

"What does that mean to me?" Karo picked up his silver remote and fingered the dials.

"We took the antenna down off the roof." This time the guard spoke with even less resolve as the projector displayed random blocks of snow and hissed loudly. "We can't take the chance it could be used by spies to send out communications. When the Fire Lord has left, we'll put it back up."

"Very well." Karo couldn't fight this sort of thing and it would be over in a few days. He disliked the fact someone else he barely knew would take over his room. He had not had a good day. He still stung from the fight with Freddie and didn't wish to see Sam unhappy as she could make others miserable. "I need a few minutes to collect some clothes and things."

"Certainly."

"If my parents ask where I've gone, tell them I've taken a room at the pub in the village." Karo said calmly. "If I'm around here with all the big people, I fear I'll get stepped on." Karo went to his wardrobe and pulled out a hockey bag and began to pack things in it.

The pub owners knew Karo and Azula as 'their noble customers'. Karo walked into the village with his hockey bag slung across his chest. He made his way to the pub down the road as he tried to slowly let his anxious nerves unwind. Karo saw his friends from a distance forming a colorful cadre sitting at the table enjoying a meal and he waved to them.

"What are you doing here?" Azula asked with some surprise in her voice.

"What is Spencer doing here?" Karo walked up to the table.

"Spooks have taken over the palace." Spencer held a piece of gray meat between his chopsticks. "What am I eating?"

"Killer whale testicles."

Spencer coughed up. "Nobody told me. Gross and I was enjoying that." He reached for his beer. "What kind of gross stuff is in my mug?"

"Beer." Karo said as he turned to Azula. "The spooks took over my room to set it aside for Lady Mai."

"Oh lovely." Azula bristled at the name of the Fire Lady. "But why are you here?"

"They disconnected the dish so no TV or radio." Karo sat down on a chair. "I figure I would be more comfortable in a room at the pub than under the feet of Lord Zuko's spooks." He looked at Spencer who had turned a bile green. "Didn't anyone tell you? I assumed you might have guessed we ate whale testicles as the whales on this planet are such good singers."

"They use stem cell cultures to grow them." Carly patted her brother's back and smiled. "They don't kill whales."

Azula leaned back and enjoyed herself as she watched the normal human flesh tones return to Spencer's face.

"If we could sneak into the shuttle bay under the castle; we could steal the Dzhavarsk and disappear." Azula suggested.

"The Dzhavarsk?" Spencer coughed.

"The Zhao Royal Yacht." Azula sipped her drink and explained. "Named for this valley. It may no be all that big but it has a hyperspace capability and moves and handles like a gem." Azula spoke with some envy.

"My father dropped a fair amount of money on that yacht ten years ago. The Ikhsel (Falcon) class yachts have performance in mind but they lack range." Karo began to sound suspicious. "I don't like the direction of this conversation."

"It uses two Chelyabin 120 Implosion Fission Engines and we could have it up and ready to launch in twenty minutes to a half hour." Azula suggested as Carly and Spencer listened in. "I know your dad would have kept those engines fuelled and ready."

"What does that mean?" Carly asked. "Chelya-what?"

"They work like an atomic bomb detonation but on a smaller scale." Karo said this as if unleashing fission were a trivial matter. Fission had become a reliable technology and Karo could not have imagined the bad luck humans had had with this kind of thing. "Instead of vaporizing a city, a pit or sphere of plutonium gets squeezed by powerful force fields and detonates but the energy provides power and thrust. They have the advantage of much greater efficiency. Unlike other engines that use fission or fusion, they can start cold and so we can leave quickly. We need a few minutes to plan our flight and program the flight systems, do some checks on the ship, load supplies, figure out how to sneak away with a yacht and we're off. Did I tell you I sense dread?"

---

"You have the start-up codes?" Azula leaned over to Karo.

"I had the start – up codes almost a decade ago." Karo emphasized the time that had passed. "I don't know if they were changed. When we used the ship I had the duty of navigation and so had the computer codes we used back then."

The quartet walked down a long tunnel that ran from a copse of trees to the passages beneath the castle. Spencer had visions of the tunnel allowing prisoners of the evil former Lord of the Castle to escape but the finely finished hexagonal concrete walls and pipes hinted at a more mundane function. Karo informed them the tunnel carried irrigation water to the vineyards. As they walked past a series of large electric water pumps in a domed cavern under the castle, Karo was proven right but Karo had a perfect memory and knew his way through these passages.

The vast network of tunnels under the palace had evolved and like a system of roots during each generation. In ancient times, the castle lay in the midst of hostile Earth Kingdom territory and crudely dug tunnels allowed the Zhao family and the retinue of soldiers to have supplies, fresh troops and weapons smuggled into the walls of the castle. Other tunnels served the vineyards as they led to the vast network of caverns used to age wine. Still others simply acted as ducts, wire chases and utility corridors.

Azula knew most of the effort to secure the castle would be applied to making the main building of the castle difficult to penetrate. Portable force fields would set off the wing of the castle aside for his brother while excluding anyone not welcome. The maze of tunnels below the castle could be cut off by closing a half dozen doors and since only Karo and his father had the extensive knowledge to navigate through them without spending days trying to get out.

Karo had other problems on his mind. Even if they didn't get caught, and he didn't trust his luck; they had to climb another thirty stories through the bowels of the castle. A thirty story climb up a set of well designed stairs could wind the best athlete – climbing thirty stories using metal ladders inside ducts in the dim light of the palace tunnels didn't fit into Karo's evening plans.

"What would happen if we had an earthquake right now?" Spencer asked eagerly.

"We don't get earthquakes here." Karo led the group into a metal lined tunnel that led upward toward a dim light. "At least none worth mentioning. Of course lately I've had luck, but all of its been bad so having the castle fall on top of us may not be far from my fate."

Carly whined slightly as the tunnel closed in around her. The metal walls were perfectly smooth gray metal and the dim light made the space feel tight. Azula and Karo could walk upright in the small space but she had to crawl as her and Spencer walked behind Karo.

"What's this tunnel for?" She squeaked.

Karo looked behind him as he heard the panic in Carly's voice. "An access tunnel for the engineers that work on the water system."

"Hold it together." Azula patted Carly's shoulder.

"So that's how they plan to secure the palace." Karo exclaimed. "Anyone with an organic brain should back up."

"Why!" Azula yelled.

"They have set up a cerebral immobilizer field." Karo pushed Spencer back. "If you walk through it, it will paralyse you and you'll fall on your back. If they really mean business then a second attempt is fatal." At this moment, Karo fell back and Azula had to catch him to break his fall.

"How can it affect you?" Spencer asked as he backed up. "You're brain is artificial."

"My peripheral nervous system works like yours – muscles and bones and nerves." Karo could feel nothing but an annoying numbness at the tips of his fingers. "Your brother has left nothing to chance. I'm almost annoyed."

"Welcome to the Family Mausoleum." Azula announced as the group entered a huge cavern. "Do you care for a guided tour? In this place, you can find the great Zhao's of the past buried in their eternal slumber." The dimly lit cavern had the look of a place to bury the dead. Dust in layers covered roughly carved niches in the dark rock that looked like the right size to hold a human body. The evil looking orange light added a kind of infernal touch that suited a resting place for the dead.

"It looks like a dark hole." Carly added her thoughts. A half hour had passed since the security field had turned them back. Karo had guided them through the caverns below ground hoping to come up in a nearby vineyard but Spencer had to carry him over his shoulders as Karo had not recovered voluntary muscle control.

"Where else do you stuff your dead?" Azula paced around the circular room and read off the names of the dead carved into the stone doors of their crypt. "They go bad if left in the open."

"Quit twirling me around please." Karo asked Spencer. "I feel like vomiting."

"Can we get out of these closed in spaces?" Carly asked in a trembling voice. "I don't want to spend time with Karo's dead ancestors."

Karo tried to point but his body lacked the ability. "Head down the hallway Spencer is facing..."

"You won't find just Karo's dead relatives but also the odd faithful servant and an unfortunate estate agent who took too much in commission." Azula patted and pushed Carly in the direction Karo had indicated. "After they filled up all the niches with dead relatives and salesmen, they began burying family members in the walls of the castle."

Carly could smell the cool air and she felt relief. "Dead guys in walls?"

"Pretty much." Azula nodded. "If you knock on a wall and hear something hollow then you might have found someone buried with their jewellery. Good luck."

Spencer reached the small opening in the side of the hill with Karo over his shoulder and wishing to witness what Spencer saw in the dark gloom. Karo felt a sharp yank on his shoulders and let out a pathetic 'eep' sound.

---

Chapter 5: Chapter 5

---

Chapter 5

The Evil Undoing

Karo shook his head as what he took as a large ape twice his size, grabbed him and heaved him over his left shoulder then grabbed Carly and heaved her over his right shoulder. He joined five of his ape friends and trudged off into the night.

"Hakuri elite warriors." Karo announced dryly.

"How did they slip past all your security?" Freddie cried out from behind. "How could six big apes - ow!" The ape carrying Freddie and Spencer banged his head against a tree. "Ow!"

"Just because we can build a better jump engine does not imply we have any skills at security." Azula answered back with brief gasps as the ape carrying her stepped forward and squeezed her waist. "Have I not taught you to anticipate the big screw up? No security in the Universe can stop the idiot because they attack more often and on a broader front."

"Quiet you!" The ape brusquely commanded with an ominous accent.

"What do you want with us?" Sam pounded on the back of the ape charged with carting her and Azula off. She struck the hard leather back armor and had no idea if any of her blows caused any pain to her rugged and robust captor. "Why aren't you kicking and screaming? Azula!"

"It doesn't seem to be helping you!" Azula would have shrugged if she could. "In any event, they don't look like the kind to cave into physical intimidation."

"Why are the Hak...whatever carrying us away?" Carly asked Karo.

"If this goes on any longer, I'm going to puke." Karo watched the rough ground slip by. "Maybe we're the final candidates for the job of receptionist and this is their way of fetching job prospects." Karo tried to keep his stomach even tempered in spite of the fact he found being carried over the shoulders of an ape induced travel sickness. "I would be a liar if I said I had any clue. The Hakuri haven't been known for kidnapping but then again we have a poor understanding of their culture."

"Your people have imposed sanctions on us for our occupation of Earth." The ape carrying Karo spoke slowly as he trudged through the forest on the edge of the village. "We wish to voice our displeasure. If your people won't listen to reason, they will pay attention to intimidation. Your father and the Fire Lord will acquiesce to our demands if we use you as leverage."

"And the humans?" Karo asked.

"What about them?" The ape answered back.

Karo pondered this for a moment. Even if the apes let them go, he had no capacity to tell one ape from another and all of them wore the Hakuri black leather armor and had the same husky build.

"Yeah! What about us?" Carly shouted to allow her voice to carry over the sound of Sam's shouting.

"Humans make good workers." The ape carrying Sam chuckled even as Sam rained blows on his chest

"Have you met Sam?" Carly protested. "She doesn't work."

"She's feisty," The ape carrying her complained, "but we'll soon rid her of that."

"You smell of rum." Sam told her ape.

"At times like these, when I'm being carried off by a rum soaked ape with more hair than three month old slice of bread that I realize I have never paid enough attention to the little lessons life has in store for me." Azula complained but didn't resist.

"What lesson?" Sam grumbled as she pounded the back of the ape.

"I have no idea." Azula said. "I didn't pay attention."

Karo looked at the ground and then at the back of his ape. The apes had no flashlights and wore no night vision gear which meant they either had implants or naturally possessed good night vision. Karo could barely see the outlines of the apes and hear the protestations of Sam.

"Hurry men!" Karo's ape yelled in the Hakuri language.

Karo saw a small space craft in the center of a dark clearing in the forest. "You won't be able to leave Homeworld."

"What makes you think we're going to leave Homeworld?" Karo's ape replied with disdain. "We'll hide until our demands are met. If they're not met, then things won't go too well for you, the princess or your friends."

Karo couldn't see the face of his ape but he felt menaced anyway.

His ape led the group and stomped up the ramp of the space ship which looked like an attack helicopter without rotors. Karo didn't recognize it as a Kaitanni design and had less than full knowledge of Hakuri designs so to him it was a gun metal gray ship with no markings. His ape dropped him and Karo into seats padded with some kind of black leather and pulled down the restraining bar and locked him and Carly in place. Sam screamed and kicked but her ape managed to seat her next to Karo with Azula next to her. He made doubly sure to lock Sam down in her seat.

"This is it, we're definitely going to die." Freddie said as his ape plunked him beside Azula.

"I think we need a more informed opinion," Azula said as Freddie and Spencer were locked into their seat. "Karo? What do you think?"

"We're not dead yet but that's a matter of timing. The Hakuri will demand some kind of concessions and your brother and the Council of Nobles will tell the Hakuri to get stuffed and then we die." Karo answered back as the blue eyed ape that had hoisted Freddie and Spencer into their seats stared at him. The ape held a large rifle with a black stock that functioned as a taser and probably had a kill setting. "We don't negotiate with terrorists. A fine policy in many ways but one that stinks if you find yourself being the pawn in the negotiations with terrorists."

---

The ape ship landed in the back of a very shoddy looking house surrounded by walls and shaded by ragged and sandblasted Lombardi poplars. Carly and Azula emerged from the ship into the dim light of morning and saw a squalid hole. A recent rain had turned the back yard dirt into sandy muck and mud.

"Where are we?" Azula asked Karo.

"An old farmhouse in the Exclusion Zone." Karo looked around the yard in the dim yard.

Freddie looked around and didn't like something about the name Exclusion Zone. "Why do they call it the Exclusion Zone." He asked as his ape tormentor poked him in the back with a rifle butt.

"One of the more insane weapon's programs we dreamed up during the war with the Hakuri," Karo scowled at his ape captor as the ape struck him with the rifle butt to encourage him to walk faster. "We invented a biological weapon based on one of the nastier strains of genetically engineered flu viruses. Called Project Blue, it was a technological feat in its day but the weapons lab had a massive leak and everyone downwind living in the villages and farms took seriously ill and many died. This virus still resides in local birds and the odd marsupial. Azula and I have been vaccinated but if you, Spencer, Carly or Sam begin to bleed from the eyes, mouth and rectum and go insane – you'll need medical attention. Don't pet any living animal."

"What medical attention?" Freddie asked impatiently. "Do you see a hospital?"

"Euthanasia counts as medical care." Azula answered. "If any of you get sick, we'll bash your brains in with a rock as painlessly as possible."

"That would hurt!" Freddie spat out.

"You! You! You!" Azula feigned indignation as she teased Freddie. "Don't you think of anyone else. As your medical services provider, I'd have to fill out all that paperwork for your care. We'd have to bill your family for the use of the rock."

"The Hakuri found the perfect hideout." Karo diplomatically changed the topic of conversation. "Even today, they haven't tried to resettle this place."

"They evacuated everyone within a hundred kilometer radius of the facility." Azula continued to explain as they squelched across the back yard of the dilapidated complex. She could see the peeling white stucco even in the dim light and smashed red clay tiles littered the ground around the house. "No one has ever returned because the animal population still undergoes epidemics from time to time and the vaccines have proven only partially effective."

Carly and Karo stepped across the wooden threshold of the back door which no longer had the door. The ape brushed aside a mouldy heavy green cloth tarp that kept out the weather.

"You must admit no one would ever look for us here." A low grizzly voice spoke from the dim interior of the house. "Imagine my surprise when I learned the perfect and proper Kaitanni – the ancient and wise race of angels – had such a history: a germ warfare project during our last war."

Azula peered in through the darkness and saw a tall ape in the dim light of an oil lamp uncomfortably seated in a leather covered couch made for the proportions of her race. "We never claimed to be a race of angels. Who are you to kidnap us and bring us to this pox infested diseased plague pit?"

"I am the kind of person who speaks and people listen." The ape replied.

"The radio announcer who reads the news at the top of the hour?" Karo shook his head. Carly and Sam glared at him.

"Such a machine." The ape remained a dim silhouette. "We have not achieved anything close to your level of sophistication. We have made much progress but we haven't made the same level of progress as your people. After the War, our races began a lucrative trade in technology from your planet in exchange for raw materials and cheap goods from ours. In the recent months, your government has placed embargoes against trade because of the dispute over our occupation of the Earth. We have decided to protest this narrow minded approach in a manner that cannot be ignored."

Freddie spoke up in defence of his home planet. "You have four of us from Earth. Do you think we'd approve of a forced occupation of the Earth?"

"What force?" The ape laughed. "The survivors of your apocalypse have more basic worries than their liberties. We provide food and have provided the means to rebuild. The Earth has many examples where they have greeted their conquerors as liberators. Your Kaitanni hosts haven't learned much about your history. We have taken many lessons from it."

"Our ape overlords?" Spencer asked. "Take us to your bananas?"

"The attempt at sarcasm works in both directions," the ape answered back, "as your race are apes as well. I suppose we all tend to fall victim to appearances."

"Don't your people have a way of watching everything on the ground?" Sam asked Azula in a badgering manner as if Azula and her kind had fallen short of their duties because they had been kidnapped by the ape race.

"Orbits are orbits and the laws of orbital mechanics don't change even for us." Azula sighed with frustration.

"Indeed," the ape commander answered as he picked up a metal mug with some acrid smelling tea, "we have the information on how the satellites are tasked so we know when to go out in the open and remain unseen. "He sipped his drink, coughed and then resumed. "Fortunately for us, the observers looking at all those pretty pictures don't pay much attention to things that happen in places like this."

Azula had to agree. Meteorologists watched the weather, other experts watched traffic, farms or other features of the planet. In such a well ordered society as this, watching the people go about their daily affairs proved less than useful. The watchers could watch the countless transactions as people rode buses, bought things and left behind an easy to follow trail of electronic information. Her captors knew this too. They used no electrical devices and lit their hideous spaces with ancient oil lamps, and probably had other low tech methods for sending out messages.

"This isn't about trade." Karo spoke up.

Azula had worried about Karo's ability to speak the truth at an inopportune moment and feared this could be the time. She suspected the same thing but feared it might be true. The embargo against the Hakuri wouldn't have impaired their economy as the two races traded very little. The Kaitanni had never let the Hakuri have any access to their high technology and the Hakuri had nothing the Kaitanni had any interest save some rare minerals.

Officer Orda saw it as the arrogance of the Kaitanni. He had quite a different view of these things from the stuck up, isolationist Kaitanni and their closed society. He saw his job as one of opening up the eyes of the Kaitanni to Hakuri aspirations in technology and trade. His superiors had many of the same reservations. 'Of course we resent the Kaitanni!' was one refrain, 'but they are an ancient and mysterious people and we don't have a chance of standing up to them!' came the second.

Orda looked up at the cyborg. "I apologize for this but as I understand it," he began formally, "you have the ability to transmit and receive messages over some unspecified distance?" Orda turned slightly and waved.

His guards grabbed all of his captives while he walked toward Karo. "We have little information on artificial life forms but this instrument in my hand detects wireless signals. He faced Karo with a box with a display of red lights and small characters. "How do I deactivate your wireless sense? Please be aware that any signal you send will register on our equipment so any attempt to deceive me will not go well for you." He placed his hand on the top of Karo's skull.

Azula kicked out but the heavier ape soldier held the princess fast. "You can't mutilate the son of a duke!" was her protest.

"If he doesn't lie, he won't be mutilated." Orda showed yellow teeth as he smiled.

"Push my right ear." Karo began with a note of resignation.

---

Karo never slept but he never noticed how silent nights grew when he had no ability to detect wireless signals. He had no idea how clearly he could receive anything in the windowless room but like a blindfolded man in a dark room, he found it more objectionable to be deprived of a sense than not able to use a sense due to imposed circumstances. The Exclusion Zone had a large array of communications towers for civilian and military communications and the main Interstellar Communications Array lay out in the middle of the Exclusion Zone. The Exclusion Zone formed a vast circle in the middle of the Seewong desert – an immense area the size of Africa that comprised the area that came closest to being a real desert.

Karo sat quietly beside Carly while Azula walked around the cold concrete room lit by an oil lamp. Sam lay on a metal slab hung from the wall by chains and slept.

Karo had forgotten how much his wireless system had become integrated into his sense of self. He couldn't find the four points of the compass or check the time.

"What are you looking at?" Carly stirred for a moment.

Karo blinked. "Not much." He turned his head. "You need your sleep."

"Yeah! but I keep thinking," she patted Karo's shoulder, "how about you?"

"Thinking about our evil captors." Karo replied in English without the aid of a translation device. "Who gave these men their marching orders?"

Carly paused for a moment. "What do you mean?" She had to think about how to form English properly. "Why are you speaking English?"

"Our Hakuri probably don't yet understand it." Karo looked ahead. "We have guards in the hallway and they can hear everything in these rooms."

"What's on your mind?" Carly sat next to Karo and leaned on his shoulder for warmth.

Karo raised an eyebrow. "Earth and Homeworld lie five hundred light years apart – a wireless signal would take that long to travel one way from here to there. The advanced races have invented tachyon communications using odd, faster than light particles. Even at that, it would take six weeks to make the round trip."

Carly yawned. Karo offered warmth in the cold room and since he had invited her to join the family; she had not had any bonding time with her new brother. "Time?"

"Time is their problem." Karo continued. "They took out my wireless antenna to keep me from calling out for help. They have much the same problem: If they emit a wireless signal, we would pick it up." Karo patted his knees. "A tachyon receiver for faster than light communications requires huge amounts of power and we would notice either the transmission or the power consumption. Such equipment needs a fusion reactor or antimatter reactor to power it. I keep wondering who these apes are, and who they work for."

"They could have given us a deck of cards." Carly added.

Azula stood over both of them and held out a tablet computer. "They didn't deprive me of my wireless capability." She spoke English with a deep, heavy accent that reminded Carly of German but she could make herself understood. She held up a tablet computer she produced from inside her vest. "The Exclusion Zone lies in the middle of nowhere and what is the middle of nowhere good for?"

Karo and Carly looked at her with unknowing glances.

"Transmission towers!" Azula began working the touchscreen of her pear pad. "No one wants domes, thousand meter tall towers and dishes the size of fields in their backyard. They don't want prisons or toxic waste dumps either. Once you make a tract of land unlivable, you can put it to all those uses and more. You won't find a cluster of ugly, microwave and radiation emitting communication gear or prisons full of psychotic inmates anywhere else in our Empire."

Carly felt Karo's ears twitch like a cat and giggled. "What was that?"

"A machine that always responds in the same way is a brittle tool." Azula smiled as she kept working. "Karo has a pair of infrared sensors – one on each ear – his diagnostic ports. He doesn't use them except when he goes to his doctor and has to 'talk' to a medical computer to see if he has any glitches. They have too short a range to serve any useful communications purpose but maybe we can use them now."

Karo realized what Azula had in mind. The signals he picked from his infrared ports up had objectionable amounts of noise picked up from the heat of objects around him. They could send and receive data from only about ten meters and he had to work hard to piece together a complex signal into something useful.

Karo's ears twitched involuntarily as the automatic gain system sought to pick up a clean and ghost free signal. He felt like he had some kind of odd tick and hated the sensation.

Azula moved around waving her tablet around slowly. Carly thought she looked like a television viewer from the late sixties adjusting rabbit ears trying to acquire a clear signal.

"What are you trying to do?" Carly couldn't resist feeling Karo's ears flick back and forth.

"I have a tablet computer with wireless but the processor is gutless." Azula moved around the room, stopped and tried another position. "I might spend days trying to find a telecom channel and sending out a message. Karo uses wireless as a sixth sense and can sift through millions of wireless channels a second and send out a signal on a channel where someone is likely to pick it up but the apes took away his antennas." She moved again. "I'm trying to pick up signals on the wireless band and send them through an infrared link to Karo so he can use that big brain of his to sort through them, compose a message and I can send it out on wireless."

"I have Analog One." Karo waved at Azula to stop three inches over Sam's bed. Analog One referred to the State Radio Broadcaster which had a cluster of ageing AM transmitters clustered somewhere in the Zone. The Seewong Desert had a number of permanent mining settlements, as well as clusters of isolated settlements that serviced the roads and semi-nomadic tribes who had lived in the vast tracts of arid land for eons. Analog One picked up the audio programs from the broadcast centers of the Empire from fiber optic cables and sent them out on various AM frequencies at high power. This meant the nomads didn't have to carry around a dish for proper satellite reception but could still pick up state propaganda assuming they had a radio. The Imperial State broadcaster was an equal opportunity annoyance.

"Analog One?" Azula kept moving the tablet in various ways hoping to grab a channel used for information exchange: the aim of the exercise was to use Karo to pick up such a signal and send out an appropriate message. "What about a mining company sending out a call for more beer? Anything like that?"

Azula walked slowly past Sam as she slept.

"I have about thirty channels of noise on top of the five million watt signal from our State Broadcaster. If you must know, it's ten past noon here." Karo had a headache as he sorted out signal from noise. AM and FM analog radio detected themselves but Karo had much more of a hassle picking up digital signals which often carried high levels of encryption that made them look to like noise.

Sam sat up like a viper and had Azula in a choker hold before Azula could utter the word 'eep'.

"What are you up to?" Sam hissed between her teeth.

"What do you think?" Azula answered back with an astonishing calm brought on by the lack of oxygen. "Shave you bald then use your golden hair to barter with the chimps for our freedom. They find your blond hair adorable."

Sam strengthened her hold on Azula. "I haven't had real meat in ages and I am in a very bad mood."

"I hope that isn't a metaphor for human sexual relations." Azula gasped as Sam held her. "English has two parts of speech – stuff and sexual metaphors. I see spots and a tunnel – can I go now."

"Hold it!" Karo waved his hand and cried out. "I have a slow connection to the telecom network. Don't move a millimetre!"

Carly could hear Azula gasping and Karo concentrating.

Karo sent out his digital feelers through the network reaching for the Fire Lord and his switchboard. He had a message composed – a terse explanation and all the information about their possible location in the Exclusion Zone as well as the tactical information on the Hakuri in the complex.

Carly held her breath and didn't move.

Sam held onto Azula keeping the desire to choke her fresh in her mind as she gritted her teeth. Sam found Azula's small stature rather startling. Azula had a verbal presence far larger than her small slightly over a meter tall frame would suggest and Sam felt like she had begun to choke a child. This did not deter her in the least.

"I did it!" Karo exclaimed. "Please keep still so I can see if I get a reply..." He said quietly as he held his breath. No one paid the least attention to him.

Carly let out her breath.

Azula had often put herself in socially awkward positions because she had what Carly would call a smart mouth. Sam blatantly told everyone what she thought; Azula had a clever, acerbic wit, a rich sarcasm, cynical nature and sense of wordplay that made certain she would say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong moment.

Sam let Azula go.

"How much do I owe you?" Azula said as she sat up and after she was sure she was out of Sam's reach. "Does our moment of intimacy merit some kind of tip?"

Azula's wisps of dark brown hair hung down her face as she stood up and Sam wondered whether or not to give the princess a good black eye. Azula looked like an innocent girl and yet had such a smart mouth but something in her deep amber eyes betrayed a complex woman with great psychological strength. Sam held back: Azula had a frame half her size and probably would suffer a massive concussion if Sam hit her with the blow she wanted to deliver.

Karo looked at the two girls. "Can you get back into position again?"

"Don't fight!" Carly admonished, "it's not ladylike."

"Which one of those two do you intend to reach with those words?" Karo asked innocently. "Azula? Sam? Azula has a brain not entirely suited to social occasions and Sam has a brain not entirely suited to moral conduct."

Sam gave Karo a look which silenced him. Sam spoke the universal languages of threats. She hadn't quite worked out how Karo worked. He didn't lie according to Azula. He also had a fairly inexpressive face which betrayed little about his feelings.

Karo resumed his duties listening to the signals he could make out dancing in the ether. He had used his infrared capacity to send a command to the toaster when it began to talk too much about toast but he had to admit that it took his full powers of concentration to finally shut the appliance up and in the end he had a toasted bagel.

After five minutes of eye watering observation, Carly finally had to speak up: "Karo! For goodness sakes! Blink!"

"So far nothing!" Karo had not held high hopes of receiving a reply as he had low hopes of anyone receiving his message.

---

Carly had tried to teach Karo to blink 'properly' and not on a five second schedule but the idea eluded him. Carly could come to believe Karo had a human mind and yet he revealed his machine nature by his inability to grasp simple human behavior and his rather charming mild mannered kindness.

Karo wondered when their hosts would bring food as all this effort he had devoted to learning to blink (which did nothing for him) made him hungry.

A nervous guard grunted at the door and held a tray of biscuits and battered metal cups of some kind of beverage.

"Excuse me?" He barked out with a heavy accent. "I bring food. Orda orders you not be mistreated."

"Doesn't imprisonment mean mistreatment?" Azula shot daggers at the guard. She knew the Kaitanni would mistreat their Hakuri prisoners by keeping them awake and feeding them biscuits with weevils and she expected similar treatment. "What have you got there – hairy? Biscuits? With or without weevils?"

"Survival rations," the guard shuffled, "same as we eat and tea – your kind of tea. If you want weevils; I can ask that they be included."

"Put the tray down twitchy," Sam walked forward.

The ape placed the tray inside the door and shuffled off.

"Lets see what we have." Sam nudged past Azula but Karo reached the tray first.

"The tea is doing a good impression of what leaks from cesspools," Karo looked at the dark liquid, sniffed and took a sip from one of the cups. "I see no floating bugs and they gave us a pack of sweetening tablets." He held up a blister pack of two dozen pink pills with five green ones at the far end and popped one into his drink. He took another sip. "Not bad – kind of makes up for the fact the tea tastes like tea and the stuff to clean drains."

Sam laughed and then stared at the foil blister pack in Karo's hand. "Do you know what those are for?"

Karo looked at the packet. "Yes...but from your tone of voice I'm likely wrong and will be poisoned."

"Birth control pills!" Sam grabbed the package out of Karo's hand and he spilled his drink.

"What are they?" Azula asked.

Carly whispered in Azula's ear for a few seconds.

"Uh?" Azula searched for words. "What on Homeworld for!" Azula looked around the room. "I really had no plans to pass the time doing that! I have no such desires and Karo would probably need new device drivers! What's wrong with a Pai Sho table or a deck of cards? Human women really have that kind of impeccable timing? You can do this on a fixed schedule? Extraordinary. I had no idea."

"They have my MOM!" Sam turned around.

"Okay..." Azula said in confused amusement.

Karo raised his hand. "Can I try one of the green ones?"

Sam turned around abruptly and whispered to him what the green pills were for.

"I'm a male...what if I want sweet tea and am not menstruating? Aside from the wrong gender and not being a mammal? The regular timing intrigues me – how does that work? We have atomic clocks accurate to one second in fifteen billion years yet we can't schedule flights reliably." Karo asked as he tried to find some cultural significance to having green saccharine pills only during menses. "I can't have sweet tea? Seems like an awful bother to put me through but I suppose it's a kind of equitable compromise in lieu of the cramping."

Azula remained silent because she didn't want to look as foolish as Karo. She understood the biology in principle but her parents had not installed the genes to make it all work. She found herself in the same position as a healthy person trying to understand how low blood sugar felt to an insulin dependent diabetic. She could have resented that someone else made the choice for her of having a husband and family but in her practical mind it saved her a good deal of feminine upkeep.

"Shut up Tin Man! My MOM uses these type of birth control pills!" Sam waved them in front of Azula.

"You're here so I take it they're not entirely effective?" Azula sneered. "The Hakuri have looted your system and maybe they thought the pills were some kind of sweetener. I wouldn't have known what they were for unless Carly told me." She turned to Carly, "and now I have a new disgusting image to rid my mind of."

"My mom sent it to us as a message." Sam picked up Karo and threw him over her shoulder. "They have my mom! We have to find her." She marched out the doorway.

"Why?" Karo asked. "Did she hold some position of importance?"

"No!"

"Why would they kidnap her? Humans cost a good deal to feed." Karo looked up to a chest plate made of studded leather and a burly ape guard carrying a mace. He found himself turned in a semi circle and faced another burly ape guard. "This doesn't even begin to address other questions but I won't go into those."

Carly stood next to Azula as they sipped tea sweetened with birth control pills from bashed cups.

"I remain utterly confused." Azula said as she watched the action taking place a meter beyond the door. She pushed a second pill out of the pack and dropped it into her tea to cut the bitterness.

She handed the pack to Carly. "You sure these won't harm you? I have no idea how these things work or how your good and plenty ticks. They won't make you grow more breasts? I don't think I have that worry as I have none to speak of."

"You're fine as you are." Carly smiled. "I doubt I'll have any ill effects."

Karo fell back into into room.

"Are you okay?" Carly spoke over the protests of Sam and the grunts of apes.

"Maybe." Karo said. "Can I have some progesterone sweetened tea?"

"What if birth control pills do something odd to poor Karo?" Carly asked.

"You do know how bad this tea tastes?" Azula blew on her tea. "Many mundane items have other uses – your people call it The MacGyver Rule."

Karo let a pink pill dissolve and began to sip his tea.

Sam fell back into the room and flew out the door screaming and delivering punches at the apes.

---

The General Theory of Life, The Universe and Fate was a formal name given to what humanity knew as Murphy's Law. The elegant mathematical expression had been fully elucidated by some ancient wise mathematician on Karo's home world when he attempted to figure out why bills came early in the post while checks were delayed or never arrived.

Azula had taken a course on advanced Life, The Universe and Everything Theory partly as a prerequisite course and partly to break herself of the habit of taking all of the foul ups in her life as personal affronts. She paced the room pondering something called a Modular Function which described the way crap flew when it hit the fan and waited for some rescue to arrive.

Carly used the ever patient Karo to make a cat's cradle or as Karo called it – Lemur Wing.

Sam dozed on the bench she had chosen.

A middle aged human woman dressed as a Hakuri military officer and an ape guard walked into the room.

"Eek!" Carly squealed.

Karo whispered to Azula. "You expecting anyone?"

"They keep getting uglier don't they?" Azula whispered back. "Human's don't age well."

"At least you see it."

"Mom!" Sam screamed in astonishment as she sat up. "How did you!"

"If I survive this, remind me to check to see if my neural net processor has been recalled for major defects in engineering." Karo looked up to a blondish woman who by his standards appeared to be twice his height and four times his mother's age. Azula appeared to have similar problems understanding the situation as she had a look of bemused befuddlement.

"They didn't bomb the remote village in Mexico where I had my boob job." The woman said casually. "I found my way back home and you had gone – most of the people had gone. I owed some bad people lots of money before the bombs fell. The Hakuri – these apes – came and took over and I needed a job since most of the men have gone and I owed money."

"But if most of the people were gone," Azula asked as she fidgeted, "wouldn't most of the people who demanded money from you have gone as well?"

"Princess Azula and Karo Zhao." The woman towered over Karo. "The Hakuri speak of your race as arrogant, boring and unfeeling."

"What's a boob job?" Karo had searched for a meaning but his family rated mental dictionary came up with nothing. Carly whispered something in his ear and Karo forgot to blink for a few moments and nodded.

Sam pushed past Karo and Azula and faced her mother. "How did you end up here?"

"I spy on the Empire for the Hakuri." Sam's mom didn't expect a hug from Sam but Sam gave her one in greeting. "I look enough like a Kaitanni woman to roam around this planet unnoticed. I can pass for someone from the lower castes. Do you know how much I hate your snooty nobility? The Hakuri pay well for the information I can obtain."

"You're a spy?" Sam asked before Karo or Carly got around to asking the obvious.

"It pays well."

Karo knew what the Empire did to most spies but until the Hakuri had occupied Earth, they had difficulty recruiting spies. The Kaitanni had a closed society and the Hakuri attracted undue attention on a planet where the people had little body hair. The odd Hakuri plot to buy information sometimes worked: the Hakuri diplomat found himself expelled from the Empire and anyone else wound up dead. Now with the Earth under Hakuri control, the humans could pass for Kaitanni and the Hakuri could recruit spies from the desperate and starving humans.

Sam decided she had to know the punishment for espionage. "What would your people do if they caught a spy?" She directed her question to Azula.

"Before or after we boil her alive?" Azula answered back in a matter that assured Sam the outcome would not be good. "Why are you all looking at me like that? We tried to establish better relations with the Hakuri during the reign of my grandfather, Fire Lord Envir. During the War with the Hakuri, he had won great fame as Admiral Envir. As Fire Lord, he worked toward a lasting peace with the Hakuri only to have his efforts come to nothing because the Hakuri betrayed him. The Hakuri established a spy network based in the lower castes. The Hakuri offered money and within a few years had a network of petty operatives all over the Empire even in the highest levels of the palace."

"I have my loyalties to Earth." Sam's mom interrupted confidently.

"Our own spies infiltrated the network." Azula answered back. "While our traitors had great ambitions, the Hakuri didn't train them properly and we soon arrested all of them. When the Fire Lord accused the Hakuri ambassador of spying, the ambassador denied everything. We couldn't touch him because of diplomatic immunity so we expelled him from our territory. Envir ordered the execution of any Kaitanni implicated in espionage. The Fire Lords have a long tradition of punishing betrayal with brutality and Envir proved no exception to the rule. He ordered one thousand people executed in the manner of traitors – they had their skin peeled off and were boiled alive in the acidic and boiling waters of the lake of a volcano called The Boiling Rock."

"Oh ew!" Carly said.

Sam looked worried and this surprised Azula who had come to believe Sam had a fearless and cruel nature.

"Stupid!" Azula scolded. "You may have put all of us in danger." She stood on her tiptoes in the face of a middle aged woman. "What do we do now? Envir had the reputation as a kind and just ruler. Our present Fire Lord may not be so forgiving. If he's in a good mood we all may be found traitors and given a show trial. If he's in a bad mood we'll all die most unpleasantly."

A dull thud caused cement dust to fall from the walls and ceiling. The room shook for a few moments.

"Earthquake?" Carly asked Karo if for no other reason than to distance the conversation from the unpleasant history of Fire Lord Envir and the Boiling Rock.

"Not likely. An earthquake is rare in these parts" Karo slowly approached the doorway.

A second deep rumble rolled through the room. A loud earsplitting pop followed by a loud fizzle and hum followed like an aftershock and the room began to fill with the smell of burned hair and ozone.

Karo peered out the door steeling himself for the black leather sole of the boot of the guard hitting his face and saw nothing but dust in the dim light of an abandoned oil lamp. Karo took a few tentative steps and bumped into Freddie who held out an arm that had once had a chimp attached to it. Whatever had befallen the arm and by implication the rest of the chimp had cooked it and the wet end of the limb gave off smoke and steam. Freddie held it with a look of addled disgust as if he had no idea whether dropping it on the ground would be showing disrespect for the dead.

"To quote your sister – ew!" Karo stepped back. "Freddie chewed through all the apes!"

Spencer came around the corner with a device that looked like a crock pot with internet connectivity. "I unplugged this thing. Does any know what it does?" Spencer looked ashen and visibly shaken.

"A post office teleporter?" Karo scratched his head. "You place a parcel inside it, pay a fee and the parcel gets reduced to its basic quantum constituents. The machine digitizes it and rebuilds it at the receiving station – whatever post office is nearest the address you punched in." Karo opened the hinged lid and looked inside the teleportation chamber which looked like a kind of large bread machine built to accommodate moderate sized parcels. "Why would our apes have one? What did they want to send? Best Wishes to all our spies in the New Year and...?"

"Can I put this down?" Spencer asked in a pleading tone of voice. "Please?"

"I don't want to hold a chimp arm – I'm going to be sick." Freddie tried to sound calm and in control so not to appear weak in front of Carly as if Carcly could care less.

"If I tried to use this to transport a guinea pig to my grandfather in Yakima – in theory what would happen?" Spencer asked with some hint of dread.

"You get a dead copy of it at the address you sent it to and a not very well off copy of it in the teleporter. If your grandfather didn't know what a guinea pig looked like inside out ; well – he'd have a good idea after you sent it." Azula came out from their doorway as she delivered the lecture. "A box of carefully packed glassware will end up at the destination none the worse for wear. A living thing has complex chemical and physical reactions that make it impossible to transmit a full copy. We never found a work around for this problem and so use teleportation for the inanimate things sent through the post office. If you tried to send something living, well is that a chimp arm?"

"They wanted a way to escape if your people managed to find them." Karo added as he exited the room. "Maybe they thought they could make it work?"

"They saved a few pensions." Azula had sent things from the post using teleporters and the devices all had a large warning riveted to them to avoid sending vermin. Teleporters ripped matter apart and then transmitted the pieces over some distance. Life didn't respond well to this kind of treatment and the ape limb provided an object lesson.

Blood splatters ran across the floor as everyone walked toward the main room where they had met Orda. When they reached the room everyone saw what teleporters could do to a half dozen apes.

"What do we do now?" Karo felt himself grow queasy as he studied the smears of red goo that once had been organized into brains and spleens and lungs.

Azula stepped over the defunct apes trying to keep from stepping in pancreas. A teleporter stood on the desk of every post office in the realm and served to deliver small parcels quickly and cheaply. She had no idea what the apes had done to it to make it a deadly machine that turned all them to mush.

"What happened here!" Carly choked back her nausea as she looked in the room. She turned away from the room in distress and backed out into the hall with the horrified Spencer, Freddie and Sam.

Azula motioned for Spencer to put the post office parcel teleporter on the ground.

Karo had a theory as to what had taken place. The apes knew enough to fiddle with the teleporter and defeated the safety interlocks that prevented it from operating without the lid firmly closed and locked in place. Even at that, the field remained confined to the inner chamber unless the apes pumped up the power and reversed the direction of the scanning beam. This turned the devices from a teleporter to an organic matter shredding device – a life form crosscut shredder. Karo had no idea of how they had accomplished this but evidence proved they had managed the feat.

"If teleportation worked on living things," Karo slipped on some entrails as he walked around the concrete room. "The apes could have thought this might have helped them make their escape if they thought they might be arrested and executed. They must have modified the teleporter to scan the room thinking it would take them to some isolated preprogrammed location."

"And they ended up..." Sam's mom spoke from the hallway.

"They had a horrid accident with a teleporter that killed them that turned them into the mammal version of your Earth delicacy – Spray Cheese." Azula looked at a patch of entrails that had begun to dry and form a crust on one of the weathered concrete walls. "In a way so typical of life; may have left us utterly screwed because rescue is not certain we may end up dying of thirst or starving to death."

Sam's mom paced the hallway. "Why can't we walk out and hike back to civilization?"

"If I miss my guess; we are in an abandoned farm in the middle of the Exclusion Zone." Azula kept dodging bits of primate in the hopes of finding Karo's wireless antenna. "It has a history I won't explore now," Azula explained as she tried to avoid touching surfaces, "it's a vast biologically contaminated zone in the middle of a vast desert."

"That sounds bad." Freddie said despairingly. "Doesn't Karo have some kind of GPS system that could help us?"

"The apes removed my wireless antenna and we tried to call out with Azula's tablet computer," Karo answered with a white look on his face. "One of the reasons I'm wandering around this room in primate pulp is that I need to find those to establish some contact with the outside world."

"Your paycheck may also be late." Azula spared no time in coming up with a barbed insult directed to Sam's mom. "They didn't tell you of their plans to escape did they?"

"No!" She said urgently. "Can we just go!"

"Where?" Azula answered back.

"Away from here!" Sam's mother answered back. "You said this was some kind of contaminated zone!"

"Another reason we might die," Azula said calmly, "since many of the animals carry the virus that made this place uninhabitable. We can't hunt for food."

Azula kicked a heavy leather jacket still filled with the torso of its occupant.

"Doesn't this look like that Origami or whatever his name was?" Azula asked Karo. She kicked the jacket and heard jingling. A jewelery bright silver piece of metal the length of a deck of cards fell out of a leather pocket. Azula recognized it as one of the three wireless antennas that normally lived just under the skull cap of Karo.

"Do you know where the apes kept their supplies?" Azula asked as she led the group down a hallway and peered in each room shining her tablet computer hoping to see some supplies. She did nothing to hide her dislike for Sam's mom as she spoke. "You must know the layout of this place."

"How do I know?" Sam's mom replied. "They didn't tell me they planned to explode!"

Azula snorted in disdain. "Can you settle my mind on a certain matter. In our tray of biscuits and bad tea we found a menstrual cycle's worth of birth control pills." Azula spoke as a princess would interrogate a peasant and enjoyed it. "We had no use for them except to sweeten our tea. I'm driven to ask why a middle age human woman would need them in a hideout populated by another species of apes."

"A girl has her secrets." Sam's mother replied angrily.

"One of them genetic engineering on the fly?" Azula had the desire to anger this woman. "As a human, you have 23 chromosomes. The Hakuri have 24 chromosomes. My count is a secret because a woman has to have her secrets. Birth control would take care of itself under these circumstances as far as I can tell." Azula paused as she shone the light of her computer off the room.

"I hoarded the supply on Earth." Sam's mom wanted to choke Azula for her prim and proper nature, her ability to make anyone feel like scum and her perfect skin. "I needed to survive and I didn't want to have another child but I need to make a living. Thanks for bringing up so many bad memories!"

Everyone else followed but wanted to leave this awful place even if it meant days of travel and hardship walking through the desert with no map. Karo – the map – had seen the metal wireless antenna fall out of the black leather jacket of a headless torso. He had no desire to have them back and the very idea of having Azula insert them in his brain cavity made him so physically ill; he barfed.

Everyone had barfed. Food would not be a concern for some time. Even Azula doubled over after coming out of the room and threw up.

Azula held up her tablet computer and let the white light illuminate what turned out to be a big, damp, cold concrete space with rubble.

"Just stick those antennas in his head so he can guide us out of here!" Sam pointed rudely at Karo. "How long do you want to hang around this place?"

"We need supplies." Azula looked around the basement and found nothing but concrete rubble and six black boxes that looked like car batteries. Azula understood Karo's objections and knew she had to find some means of cleaning the antennas. They had to be clean for the system to work or Karo would find himself unable to find a clear signal or worse yet, give them directions he took as good and lead them astray. Karo the person might make sense of the intermittent information and glean a useful pattern but Karo the computer might not.

Azula peered in the boxes that looked like car batteries and found boxes of screws from the last legitimate owners of the house. If the Hakuri had supplies, Azula couldn't find them. She knew they must have brought in water and food enough for all of them as the local sources might prove contaminated.

She found a small wooden door kept shut by a wooden shim. She kicked it open with a swift kick and it fell into splinters.

"I found a well – I think." Azula cried out as she inspected a copper pipe that poked out of the ground. The room formed a crawl space about the size of a large bathroom. She could stand up and as she looked around, she found a group of boxes that did something electrical and best of all, wax coated cardboard boxes that had Hakuri writing. She couldn't read the language but after a few fruitless attempts at hitting switches, she heard a hum and a set of dim lights came on.

"Solar power inverters." Karo poked his head into the room and moved a few jagged edges of wood out of the way. "They must have put up solar panels on the roof."

Azula moved over to the boxes. "How did you reach that conclusion?"

"They wired the boxes to that set of rechargeable batteries." Karo stepped into the room. "That means the power source is intermittent which rules out geothermal. A wind plant would show up on satellite images at some point. Nuclear power cells don't use power inverters and would have given more than enough power to give us decent light." Karo inspected the boxes of hastily set up gear. "Solar is hard to spot."

"They committed suicide to avoid being captured and left Sam's mom behind." Azula sniffed something that looked like a large wheat cracker. "I can't read Hakuri so this could be food or rat poison."

Freddie banged his head on the concrete ceiling of the crawlspace as he entered. "The lights came on."

Karo ignored this. "Suicide? Why?"

"I have no idea." Azula began shuffling boxes around. "Suicide fits the facts thus far. Given the technical sophistication of the Hakuri, they knew of the technological limitations of teleportation. Inept idiots kill themselves with a thousand and one ingenious methods but I can't understand why professional soldiers would act so stupidly. They had to know how to work the teleporter to rig it in such a fatal manner. They didn't bumble around with it; they defeated the very well engineered safety systems and then set it off like a bomb."

"A kind of cyanide pill?" Freddie asked as he rubbed his head. "They thought your people had tracked them here and so they committed suicide?"

"I had another more disturbing idea." Azula answered back. "They went nuts. They came out here to set up their human spy network. The Exclusion Zone served their needs perfectly – none of our people live here, no one comes through here and better yet no one gives a shit about this place so no one bothers to watch anything going on out here."

"But they killed themselves with that teleporter!" Sam complained before Freddie had a chance to voice any objections.

"They succumbed to the virus." Karo said glumly. "In many cases, the virus damaged the limbic system of the brain leaving the intellect intact and the victim a murdering psychopath. A psychopath with power can do a lot of damage."

The installation of the antennas in Karo's head came only after the group with the exception of Sam's mom had taken turns trying to convince him to use them. He refused until Carly had found a medical kit used by the Hakuri in the boxes of supplies in the crawl space. She cleaned the metal off with something that reeked of alcohol and then water.

Karo would only allow Azula to work on him and even then, the kind of squirming normally reserved for the dentist ensued. Karo would squirm as Azula opened his skull dome and she would admonish him to stay still and he would for a moment and then he would squirm.

Freddie watched with curiosity as Azula opened Karo's head. Karo didn't have a skull as much as a kind of living carapace like a crab. The engineers never intended it to have much strength as the artificial brain had a hardened cover and they needed to save weight. The antenna were cleaned and ready to slip into the slots in Karo's brain. They made a click and then Azula closed Karo's skull dome. The seam on his forehead vanished as Freddie watched.

"What now?" Freddie asked as he watched Karo along with everyone else.

"You guys grab some supplies." Azula handed boxes to everyone. "We will try our best to keep alive."

"Now to see what we can see." Karo said in a friendly manner. Karo walked up the stairs with the others in tow and when he emerged at the top of the stairs the familiar noise returned but his brain returned an error.

"Error in kernel module..." Karo said apologetically, "error in configuring – lots of octal numbers – module failed." He saw the kind of arcane and obtuse error messages only seen by the most experienced open source software developers go flashing past in the field of his vision.

Azula stood next to Karo. "Uh crap?"

"He won't start going on about the fish?" Freddie asked.

Error! Error! Error! Karo could hear his wireless system yelling at him and barfing up errors but he had no idea why some piece of hardware he had carried in his head had would all of the sudden fail to work only twenty four hours after had last used it. "I won't go on about fish!" Karo said impatiently. "You humans had a magician that could part seas but had a bad sense of direction named Moses. He wandered with his followers for forty years in the desert. Without my wireless gear in working order, you may not last forty hours."

"You may have erased the driver when we tried to send out a message." Azula blushed as they walked past the room where small flies had already begun to have a convention on top of the ape pulp. She knew Karo's systems better than anyone other than his neurologists and knew some of his low level functions had bugs. She never had them fixed because sometimes they let her manipulate his memory. He could never forget anything but she could flip bits on various memories to hide stuff but a bug in his memory subsystem didn't give him permission to undo the damage. She once kept her diary in his brain and he failed to notice until he noticed he couldn't explain why about 64 gigabytes had gone missing from his memory. She fixed that by making him forget the discrepancy. She had every reason to believe a new bug had cropped up in his networking subsystem.

Azula smacked Karo upside the head.

Carrier detected at 10:09:21 5 by 5

Calibrating internal clock – 00121 seconds.

Initiating weth1 interface.

Position 10.34234 Degrees South by -122.32756 Degrees East.

---

Chapter 6: Chapter 6

---

Chapter 6

The Voyage Home

"I can't believe how much I miss my favorite shows." Spencer held a tablet computer in his hands and had the volume set to some unbearable level as he sat next to Karo in the co-pilot chair of the Hakuri drop ship.

Karo had no idea why Spencer couldn't sleep with the rest of his friends in the back passenger cabin of the drop ship or why the eccentric Spencer had decided to spend time with him.

"I missed a whole season of Winx Club!" Spencer announced as he leaned over to show Karo the screen of the tablet computer. "What a find – all the media files the Hakuri had when they looted our planet!"

"Indeed." Karo had a Hakuri touch panel in front of him and had set about figuring out how to send out a message and failing that, how to fly the drop ship. He didn't divert his attention to the ghastly white glow of the control panel. "A cultural treasure of great merit. If your Leonardo or Michelangelo had lived in our age and not in your Renaissance; I would imagine they would have drawn animated cartoons about teenage fairies with scanty outfits."

"Do you know your hair smells like a puppy?"

Karo tried to figure the meaning of this strange utterance out but his brain returned an error. message. Spencer had never made any sense. Karo had a theory about this: Spencer had a brain with an abnormally high level of noise and at times it swamped his ability to make sense of the world, follow simple instructions, not light himself on fire or wear clothes.

"A puppy?" Karo said halfheartedly as he worked away on understanding the Hakuri computer. "No doubt women may one day come to find me attractive?" Karo had no desire for women, had no idea exactly what puppies smelled like and so hoped to close the conversation.

"You're cute in your own way."

"Awkward feelings might distract me." Karo could hear the state news agency on the Seewong Desert's Analog One Network and on a number of digital feeds intended for different time zones. The State run News Agency never actually told anyone things they needed to know. As a branch of the Ministry of News and Information, it told them what it wanted them to hear. Karo knew if an asteroid had come close to the planet, only those involved in blowing it off course with nuclear warheads would know; the news would simply produce drivel about a meteor shower. Karo kept hoping his faint transmissions would travel to someone capable of feeding them to a civilized rescue authority but he held out little hope of that. Azula had turned off the wireless jamming but Karo still had to send a meagre signal to a satellite, feed it into the network and hope someone like Lord Zhao opened their email. He had not yet received confirmation he had any success in the endeavor.

Spencer had begun to irritate him.

"Why are you here?" Karo did his best to sound irritated. "You should go in the back with everyone else and try to grab some sleep."

"I can't sleep." Spencer announced blandly. "I can't get comfortable on that metal floor in the passenger bay."

"I have to try to make the drop ship radio work or figure out how to fly this thing." Karo ran his hands deftly over the controls and touch screens of the cockpit. They danced in a strange parade of colors and symbols as he worked. "None of their frequencies or their transmission methods come close to anything we use so I am trying to reprogram the communications system." Karo ran his hands deftly over the touch pads once more and the same swirl of colors. "If we have to fly out on this thing to escape that raises a whole new set of problems. I have no idea how a Hakuri power source works or their ship flies."

Spencer looked around the olive green cockpit dimply lit by his tablet computer and the cockpit displays and to his mind, the craft appeared sturdy enough. He could see controls in front of him – Karo had mentioned they handled navigation, weapons and provided auxiliary control if the pilot controls failed. He saw a visually inspiring clash of colors. The Hakuri language had funky curved shapes (he had no idea that they represented the syllables of their language but they looked exotic). The displays had interesting colors that changed as Karo worked the pilot controls but Spencer might have been looking at the Hakuri drop ship equivalent of a dashboard clock for all he knew.

"You have that look."

"What look?" Spencer clasped his tablet computer in his hands.

"The look of someone intrigued by buttons and who desperately wants to press that big red one." Karo pointed to a button on the control yoke for the co-pilot. It had a good many buttons on it. The big red one stood out but it had two yellow ones, a green one a black one and a set of push button switches in neon pink and blue. Karo had not worked out what it did but intelligent races usually put the means of activating mass destruction under the control of a simple big red button. Karo didn't want his life to end up as a ten megaton blip on a distant seismograph because Spencer lacked self control. The apes had self destructed; but that their ship had remained behind a nervous thought in the back of Karo's mind.

---

Azula had her own kind of problems.

She had two large raptors with glowing green eyes circling the tree she had climbed into.

She had begun the evening trying to sleep with everyone else in the passenger compartment of the drop ship but Carly snored, Sam and her mom had not settled any issues but had engaged in a loud debate with each other about who had screwed up the most. She had left the ship Freddie to camp out in the deserted tool shed at the edge of the fenced in portion of the yard – they never made it. He sat in the tree on a branch next to Azula. The tree was an old tree that had survived centuries of drought and neglect and still bore olives or rather the Kaitanni equivalent of olives.

"Well?" Freddie asked. "Can we outrun them?"

"I can outrun you." Azula shouted back shining her tablet computer at Freddie for light. "If we were treed by only one green eyed raptor twice my size; I would say 'yes' and escape while they dined on you. To be honest, they can outrun most cars so we'd be a cheap and easy meal."

"You wouldn't let them eat me would you?"

Azula shone her tablet computer's backlight down on the raptors and saw glowing eyes and orange teeth. "I would feel bad about it as they ripped you apart with their claws and teeth. I would feel worse if it were me. Nature red in tooth and claw as they say. Quit pelting them with olives you moron! Right now they have hunger as a motivation but don't add anger and revenge to their list of reasons to learn how to climb trees!"

"Can they climb trees?" Freddie looked at what he had taken as fast and deadly lizards in the light of Azula's computer.

"Raptors are intelligent pack hunters." Azula told Freddie as she lit up her face with the tablet. "That means I have no idea what they can figure out given enough motivation or the right tools. If you see them packing a ladder toward our tree; then you might want to make peace with whatever delusion you believe made the Universe."

"Oh..." Freddie wanted to climb higher but none of the branches looked like they would bear his weight.

"Too bad no one can see us." Azula groaned. "I want a good bath, a good night's sleep and a good deal less wildlife in my backyard than I have here."

One of the raptors growled out of frustration.

"Oh shut the hell up!" Azula yelled. "Why does the Universe choose to crap on me! I haven't done anything to anyone except a few spiders and they deserve it!" Azula yelled shrilly. "Do you know most people's fate is controlled by telephone numbers?"

"No?"

"Neither did I?"

A cute flying lemur came up to her with green eyes wondering why a young woman was screaming and cursing in his tree. He had lived in the tree for many years and seen nothing of the sort. He peered at Azula as if asking why she had woken him up and why she was making such a row.

"Freddie?"

"What is that thing?" Freddie saw the lemur in the dim light.

"Stand up slowly."

"Why?" Freddie slowly stood up as far as his sense of balance would let him.

Azula stood up, regal and full of calm, looking to Freddie every bit like a princess in the light of the tablet. She could have met the Japanese Emperor. With a peaceful face and regal bearing, she kicked the lemur with a solid punt sending it flying out of the tree in a shallow parabolic arc. The raptors snorted and chased after it and caught up to it as it bounced off the stone fence. Freddie cringed as he heard the sound of a lemur being shredded.

"As you humans say: Cheese it!" Azula yelled and jumped and hit the ground running.

Freddie followed if for no other reason than the very same girl who had punted a lemur out of a tree to its death, deserved to be listened to.

Carly woke up because she heard a scream and instantly recognized Freddie's voice.

"Close the door!" Freddie uttered with a hushed panic in his voice.

Two raptors snapped at the door and then lunged forward blocking the door from closing.

Carly screamed as she now had two snapping dinosaurs staring at her as she was closest to the sliding door. They had the kind of dull tan hides she had seen in dinosaur movies but the movies did not attempt to do justice to the teeth like spikes or the thrashing speed of the monsters.

"Useful." Azula pushed on the lever that closed the door hoping it would press, crush or otherwise cause enough discomfort that the two raptors would quit snapping. Freddie tried his best to help Azula but the raptors had incredible strength.

Sam tried to kick the heads of the raptors and nearly came away with one less leg.

"Man!" Sam yelled. "Those things are fast."

Sam's mother took a different approach to the problem. She looked around for a heavy metal object and found something that looked like a fire extinguisher except that it had the same olive drab color and an unreadable text as the rest of the passenger area. She threw the cylinder at the two raptors and it made a rather hollow thump and the animals shook their head.

The cockpit door slid open and Karo stuck his head out and then leaped back into the pilot seat.

Azula pushed the lever which gave way without resistance. At first she thought she had broken the mechanism and expected to see the red painted metal rod fall in her hands and then imagined the pain of being eaten alive.

The mechanism had not broken. The sliding door had a manual release to allow for quick egress in the event of an emergency. At the moment Azula pictured her scrawny form being eaten by a raptor from a perspective above her body. She imagined coming back in the next life as the lemur she had punted out the tree. The hydraulics for the door mechanism kicked in and pushed the door closed with tons of force. Everyone heard a hum. The door paused for a moment as a safety mechanism thought it had detected the presence of someone unfortunate caught in it.

The raptors suddenly went limp and collapsed. They groaned and twitched in agony for a few seconds and then slid out the door with a slimy thump. The door hummed and clicked shut.

Carly screamed.

"Are we dead yet?" Azula looked at Freddie. "If I didn't have to help you to safety because you're such a slow lumbering ass; we would have escaped them."

Karo reappeared as the cockpit door slid open. "Did that do the trick?"

"Did what do the trick?" Azula asked.

"Rocket fuel..." Karo moved to one side to let Spencer peer into the passenger area. "I think. I could have opened the dump valve on the chemical toilet but I'm sure I fired one of the manoeuvring rockets."

"My mother used it; so it could do damage." Sam pointed aft a the small door that led to the even smaller bogs.

"Quit arguing you two!" Carly commanded.

"This thing has a nuclear power plant and detonating that would kill the raptors." Karo raised his hand to quell any pending arguments. "Anyhow, in air, the thing steers like any aircraft, with elevators and stabilizers like a plane. In space with no air to push and pull against, it uses a kind of chemical rocket to steer and I took a gamble that the fuel would kill organic life."

"He always talks like a professor." Sam complained.

---

No one slept well that night.

Azula didn't need as much sleep as most of her kind but she had a series of disturbing dreams. One involved a memory from childhood when a breakfast time Magnitude 9.3 Earthquake shook the Fire Empire capitol and made the palace turn into some kind of amusement park ride. The City had sustained little damage but the same could not be said for the fine china.

Azula woke up to Carly snoring in her ear.

"That should not be possible." Azula moaned and rolled Carly over on her other side. "We're packed in here like bags of rice in a container ship and the girliest girl of all of us snores louder than an asbestos miner with one lung and four kinds of cancer."

Karo saw the brightening of dawn and with it yet another hot, sand filled desert day. He had figured out much about the ship, its systems and concluded it could still fly but he wondered if the apes might have fixed a bomb here or there to deter the kind of thing he intended to do.

Spencer had fallen asleep but the Winx Club played on.

Karo wondered how many animation loops he had overheard as the computer played on. He tried to turn the noise off but Spencer kept shifting the tablet out of his reach.

The door to the cockpit slid open and Azula leaned over Spencer. "I can't sleep."

"If I didn't know Carly snored, I would have thought we had another raptor outside."

"I'm at my wits end." Azula admitted quietly. "Can you fly this thing to somewhere with a bath?"

"I have tried calling for help but..." Karo paused to think of the best way to package the bad news, "my wireless systems lack the power to send a signal out. I can pick up data channels galore on satellites and have tried to send out a signal hoping it would somehow be picked up but no such luck. The Hakuri drop ship has both radio and tachyon communications systems but they refuse to work – the communication system wants a retina scan and seeing as the pilot is..."

"So much soup?"

"The computer system works but also requires biometrics to actually power up the flight systems." Karo sounded defeated. "I can read the instruments and have even begun to grasp Hakuri but beyond that I'm locked out."

"What does this thing use for a brain?" Azula patted Karo's shoulder. "What kind of flight computer flies this garbage can? Does it have a holographic computer system?"

"I doubt that." Karo had spent the night fiddling with the ship's computer and sensed no artificial intelligence behind the controls. "The computer still uses binary programs – not the engrams my brain uses. I would imagine either a standard optical switching or even a semiconductor based computer. It makes no difference since we have no access to it and even if we did, chances are a redundant unit would take over if we turned it off."

"You know I study history." Azula leaned over Karo and looked over the cockpit. "Did you know of the ancient method of computer repair?"

"I know my answer of a soldering iron and voltage tester is most certainly wrong."

"They had a thing called The Big Red Button." Azula whispered into Karo's ear. "If the machine ran out of control and threatened world domination or to delete the bank accounts of people who mattered then they had a guy press The Big Red Button."

Karo looked sideways at Azula. "Yes? Where are you going with this?"

"The Big Red Button set off an explosive charge that fired a metal wedge or nail into the power supply and thus shutting down the computer." Azula stood back up. "We could destroy this thing's brain in somewhat the same way."

"We have no such thing here."

"We have lots of big rocks." Azula replied. "We could find all the computer systems and bash them to the stone age."

"We'd be trapped since this thing would turn into an inert piece of crap."

Azula shook Karo's shoulder. "You could fly it. You could tell things to fire or not to fire, engines to roar or not and navigate us to a nice city with all the comforts I lack." Azula plucked the tablet from Spencer who then grunted. "Think about it. I will be in the back watching Seinfeld."

---

An hour later, the cockpit door slid open.

Karo turned around. "Yes?"

No one answered.

He looked down at the control panel and noticed a subtle change. The Hakuri word for 'self' and the Hakuri word for 'end of ship' had appeared in calm deep lavender above the clock which now had an alien looking set of characters that to Karo looked like a countdown. 'Self Destruct' sailed across Karo's mind like a loud motorboat past a peaceful summer resort at five in the morning.

He jumped out of the seat and stepped on Spencer as he slept.

"Who did what to what?" Karo grabbed the door frame and yelled into the passenger compartment.

"I found the computer core and disconnected it." Azula stood next to an open bay that once had a plate in front of it and held the large black power lead that ran from it in her hands.

Karo stepped over the still sleeping passengers and looked at a large, yellow cylinder made of some kind of cast metal. He read a metal label with black printing which stated 'Nostromo Military Industries' and 'Thermonuclear Space Mine' then 'Maximum Yield 20 Megatons' and finally 'Aim Away From Face before Arming'. It also had a bar code and a set of serial numbers for inventory purposes.

"We are all going to die." Karo said calmly. "In a way, you found a way to disable the computer systems by a unique method as they will no longer work when this thermonuclear mine detonates."

"How thermonuclear?" Azula twirled the lead.

"The Exclusion Zone will vanish and become glass." Karo explained. "The humans have this thing called 'a bucket list' and if having a cup of tea is the last item – start the kettle."

Karo tapped Sam on her shoulder. Sam grabbed Karo by the shoulder and simply growled.

"By a strange sequence of events, we're all going to die." Karo visibly shook as he spoke. "This ship will self destruct and we have no hope of outrunning the blast. If you break my neck now, I'll see you in the afterlife in about forty two minutes."

"We can't disarm it." Azula looked at the seamless heavy metal case and wondered why the builders had painted it a bright yellow. She found the color out of keeping with what color she expected the casing of a weapon of mass destruction should be.

Everyone had now woken up.

"What's with all the noise?" Carly rubbed her eyes as she sat up.

"A thermonuclear bomb will detonate about three meters from you. This will end your existence in this realm." Azula was still examining the bomb casing. "If you start running...you'll be sweaty and out of breath when you die in about forty minutes."

Everyone looked at Azula. Carly gasped, Freddie whimpered, Sam growled, Sam's mother swore and Spencer cursed the fact he'd die a virgin.

"Which one of us is Spencer looking at so oddly?" Karo asked Azula.

Five minutes later and Azula had kicked Spencer soundly in the family jewels for making an indecent proposal. She meant this to serve as a sign to Freddie or anyone else to come to grips with their imminent death.

"You have the super brain!" Carly pleaded as she stood in front of Karo. "Think of something!"

"If the bomb had a computer interface I could try and talk to it." Karo tapped his fingers.

"If we hooked up the leads to the bomb to you; what would happen?" Sam asked.

Karo had no such connection. The ship used fiber optic cables and he could see the light. He had a visual system capable of taking information in as light pulses. He could read bar codes like a cel phone. He thought for a moment.

Azula put her arm around Karo. "Sam gave me an idea. Care to take one for the team?"

"I hate the idea already." Karo thought he understood what Azula had in mind. Karo's eyes looked like biological eyes but worked in an entirely different manner. Behind a set of fine optics for focus, Karo had a diffraction grating that split the light into red, green and blue components and sent each color to a fine sensor like that in a digital camera and sent it off to the brain. This gave him fine vision for daylight but made night vision impossible as this system ate up all the light. Quite unlike humans, he had an active night vision system. Red lasers formed in a circle around the edge of his iris formed a cone of light that reflected off objects. The eyes could collect the light and his brain translated it into images. Karo could modulate the light output rapidly and thus 'see' fast motion as a kind of stop frame movie. The idea of using this to send digital information would require luck and concentration.

"What do you see?" Azula held the lead up to Karo's eye. He saw dim red light on one level and heard a hiss. He had experienced this before with fiber optic connections as he used optical connections to many parts of his body. The left side of his body twitched and his eyes began to glow dim red.

"Karo?" Azula punched him.

"Why are you here?" Karo spoke in a dry tone. "You do know I pose a danger...you have thirty one minutes to reach minimum safe distance."

"Oh! We're dead!" Sam threw up her arms.

"Quiet." Azula admonished.

Carly curled up in a corner and Spencer lay back on the floor. Sam's mom wanted to use the can but Karo stood in front of the door.

"I think its the bomb." Azula said quietly.

Azula decided to take a gambit. "We can't reach minimum safe distance. We've crashed and don't know where." She hoped Karo would still be home and working with them."

"Thirty minutes."

"Look..." Azula pushed Sam away as she pushed closer. "You don't want to kill us all."

"I don't want anything." Karo spoke. "I merely obey a set of commands. I detected that I had left Hakuri space and someone executed the self destruct directive."

"Yes...uh erm." Azula coughed. "I will tell you that we all badly want to go home but the ship has broken."

"I apologize." Karo spoke in the role as the bomb. "You will die in thirty minutes."

"This is useless!" Sam yelled. "Look you piece of crap! If you blow us up then you die too."

Karo twitched.

"Die?"

"Yeah." Sam grabbed Karo's collar. "Cease to be, burn up rather than fade away, lose your breathing privileges!" Sam shook Karo violently. "See the thin guy in the corner with the dark brown hair! His name is Spencer. He has never had a relationship with a woman of his species!" Sam pointed to Spencer who blushed. "If you blow us up then he will never meet the girl of his dreams, will never have a chance to kiss, marry, have a family of geeks, retire and grow old together. If you don't shut down..."

"I'm almost annoyed." Karo spoke in a more natural tone. "You can quit shouting."

A loud click resonated through the ship and the yellow cylinder vanished as it fell. Azula let go of the cable and it snaked away into the cavity left by the bomb and then another metallic click and things turned silent.

"What happened?" Azula looked around.

"The bomb would rather let us go than listen to Sam for another thirty minutes." Karo leaped toward the cockpit. "It ejected from the ship so it could blow up and spend its final moments in peace."

"How long will it take to start the ship?" Azula took a seat in the co-pilot seat.

"Uh..." Karo gulped. "Let me get back to you on that." As human nuclear engineers had discovered; starting a nuclear reactor didn't amount to anything as simple as turning a key and waiting for the engine to roar to life. "We have visitors."

Azula looked out and could see the elegant white and red lines of a small shuttle with the Wildlife Conservancy logo on the front below the pilot side window and a reminder (in case she forgot) that the Wildlife Conservancy worked under the auspices of the Royal Ministry of the Environment. Their T -19 'Humbug' had a tall vertical fin and two downward angled wings for atmospheric flight but the modified all terrain V-TOL craft had ample room for carrying poachers, or tethering raptors down without fear of having them eat the crew.

Karo felt moved by urgency and the need to get everyone else out of this place as fast as possible and the park rangers offered hopes of rescue. He rushed to the passenger door barely waiting lone enough for the cockpit door to slide open. He pulled the passenger door open and found two angry wildlife officers pointing laser blasters with red targeting lasers at his chest.

"Okay?" Karo held up his hands. "These aren't the enemy agents you're looking for."

"The Exclusion Zone serves as the protected habitat for the Yellow Backed Velociraptor!" A tall park ranger with a spiked metal helmet and puberty fed moustache asserted. His partner looked like a rugged middle aged man who could eat anything in the ecosystem and had a tan but he said nothing. "Their satellite tags have detected their deaths and we came out here to investigate!"

"They attacked two of our group so I used hydrogen peroxide rocket propellant to kill them. I didn't want to but I saw no choice." Karo couldn't lie but everyone else wished to stuff him in a sack.

"You do know that is a serious offense as they are a rare and valuable species of raptor." One of the officers decided to lecture Karo before apprehending the entire group. The hydrogen peroxide had proven not only corrosive but had destroyed the rare animals to the point where genetic reconstruction would prove useless. The hydrogen peroxide functioned to supply oxygen but in the concentrated form used in rockets also functioned to literally dissolve carbon and other elements out of organic flesh. As the rangers could tell; the raptors had come to a sticky and rather disgusting end.

Azula appeared and poked her head out the door. "Why do our park rangers have spiked metal helmets?"

"You have Germans?" Spencer asked. "Tell them we have a bomb on board."

"Oh crap!" Azula made a mental note to find out empirically how much pain Spencer could tolerate. "By a strange set of event..." Azula fell back into Sam as the taser round struck her in the chest.

Karo felt the sting of the taser and as he fell beck into the shuttle he wondered if he had done something very bad in a previous life such as murdering many people or having managed a bank.

A concussion knocked Karo into the world of the living although he didn't make plans for staying long. A white light penetrated the ship and it rocked back and forth tossing poor Karo around until Freddie grabbed him and held him in place. He felt a heat like that of the sun passed through a magnifying glass and could see straight, slender multicolored streaks as high energy particles entered his eyes. The radiation passed through the light ceramic composite hull as if it were nothing but air.

The door flew off and spiralled into the banks of sand blow into the air by the massive concussion. Freddie could see the ground roil and froth below as the shock wave blew the sand with winds not even seen in the wildest of hurricanes.

Azula squealed as her ears popped and began to ring. Everyone gasped for air as the cabin and adjoining cockpit underwent explosive decompression. Light blue plastic oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling of the cockpit and the rear compartment almost instantly and everyone reached for one.

Azula pulled the mask to her face and breathed in.

Karo didn't have any desire to see Freddie pass out and let go of him and pulled the mask over Freddie's face and then struggled with his own as he felt the weakness of oxygen deprivation set in.

The wall of sound from the blast struck them. Carly imagined it as the largest sound in existence. Not as much a sound as a wall in sound form. The shock wave had come and gone but the sound rumbled, throbbed and pounded on and on. The aircraft shuddered, a spark flew from the back of the cabin as a light fixture exploded.

The rangers had handcuffed everyone but Karo to a sturdy metal rail used to securing wildlife traps. Carly felt the craft accelerate and her wrists and arms burst into pain as the felt the force of acceleration push her back against the cabin wall.

Karo didn't know if the pilots were scared or had simply lost control but he grabbed the metal rail as air rushed into the cabin and sucked anything loose into oblivion. He had handcuffs and this made his gestures clumsy. He had not been fastened to the rail like the others and he had no confidence Freddie could had the strength to hold him in the cabin. He had many things to say but knew the blasting roar would make it impossible to hear his voice. He wanted to thank Azula for her close if not at times exploitative friendship. He made out a will and quickly saved it to a file in his brain on the off chance that anyone would ever find his brain and actually be able to access it. He found it sad he had so few real assets to leave to posterity.

The cabin grew silent. For a moment Carly continued screaming in strange harmony with Sam. Freddie had spewed yellow vomit on Karo's back but had held him tight. Spencer had decided he would die as he had lived – without pants or shirt – dressed only in his boxers. Sam's mom and Azula had would up in a tangle of legs and arms in the back of the cabin.

The pilot spoke in an annoyingly calm and professional voice Azula figured belonged to the outdoorsy man. "The emergency has passed." A click and a squeal followed as the co – pilot took the microphone and spoke with more urgency. "We will take you to the nearest city – Geelong – for medical treatment."

Karo knew something very bad had already gone wrong. Freddie still held him tight but his body had gone numb and he had gone blind. An act of indifferent mercy on the part of the Universe had granted him a few moments of life after the electromagnetic pulse and radiation had damaged him beyond repair. He heard voices melt into an intangible mush and then died.

---

Fire Lord Zuko had never had any reason to visit the City of Geelong in spite of their claims of being the 'Gateway to the Great Deserts'. Geelong has about a quarter of a million inhabitants and served as a regional administrative center and several major mining concerns operating in the desert had their headquarters there but it the sleepy town never merited an Imperial visit. The denizens of Geelong thought The Emperor of the Kaitanni – looked down at the sprawling net of paved streets and cheap bungalows and resolved never to visit again.

Geelong lay on the edge of the Seewong Desert in a large, flat, broad semi arid valley surrounded by eroded red hills named – in the local tongue – the Towoomba Mountains. The yacht passed over the downtown core with its clustered collection of ten to twenty story glass and steel office buildings, broad streets lined with some kind of inoffensive drought resistant palm tree. The people of Geelong looked up. Those in cars stopped and looked up as the long, slender profile of the Royal Yacht Iruin II passed overhead on its way to Geelong's sprawling spaceport.

A poor courier on a land speeder distracted by the ship's sudden arrival in their sky wiped out when he struck one of the shabby palm trees lining the street. He didn't seem to notice as he crawled out of the inverted vehicle, stood up and stared up. The Royal Yacht was an ageing but well maintained Haipan Class star cruiser customized for use by Fire Lord Zuko. The long, slender vessel had atmospheric manoeuvring tail fins that swooped down giving the elegant looking white and red vessel a look akin to a flying swan. While elegant, it was two hundred meters long and the anti gravity engines' low rumbling hum shook windows and people as it passed slowly overhead.

Most people didn't dislike Geelong only for the rather drab scenery. The Mining Concerns operated under the same planned economic system everyone else did but in the day when the Empire had not reached out into the stars, they ran with a casual disregard for law and lust for profit that made them criminals in every sense of the word. The Homeworld had little mining except in the Seewong Desert and they operated far from Geelong but they still operated at times in a manner not keeping with polite socialist society.

The yacht sailed out past downtown over a sprawling collection of strip malls and parking lots sprinkled with the odd hotel. As the yacht moved further from the city center, those on board saw empty lots of scrub grass with housing subdivisions with the odd shopping complex at strategic intersections. As they approached the Geelong Space Port, he saw ugly, dusty industrial sites for processing raw minerals, some covered vast areas. A chemical refinery of some sort covered a vast concrete paved section of land with piping, huge tanks and smokestacks. The captain of the Iruin II estimated ten square kilometers of the planet lay under this plant and knew it probably extended below ground. Unlike humans, the droids rolling around the vast network of pipes didn't look up as the yacht passed.

---

Karo didn't anticipate an afterlife. He had no soul: no machine did and as far as he knew no living thing had one. He found death a disturbing experience since he had visions or dreams and a sense of self. He lacked a sense of other and he lacked a sense of being in the sense of having an identity rooted in a location in the Universe. He had a past. He could remember Azula and the humans and his family and felt bad for their grief.

His mother and father would mourn. Azula would grieve and all would suffer.

He hated that he only lived in the past. He had no memory of the present and had no experience of anything of the moment.

He had no sense of time. Such a state would drive anyone mad but Karo needed a reality to rail against and no such reality existed.

He didn't have any reason to believe he was stuck in a coma or vegetative state. The cybernetics experts could repair and rebuild his brain and so he concluded he was dead. The Universe was even crueler than he imagined. He found this worse than simply ceasing to be but had no power to change his condition.

He wondered if he had gone to the human hell. He had no reason to suspect this. He had a machine for a brain and one compelled to be selfless. Even if God existed, why punish a humble machine?

His clock jumped to a date seven weeks and five days in the future.

"KARO?" White letters appeared in his field of vision.

"DO NOT BE AFRAID!"

The letters faded and a series of lines of text in white letters on a black background scrolled up in his field of view. He recognized his boot up sequence. They faded and a splash screen of gentle taupe replaced them.

"WELCOME BACK!" A window appeared with these words in black on a white background.

"SOME THINGS HAVE CHANGED."

"I WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING."

Karo twitched. He felt a smooth and curving surface. He tried to open his eyes but saw only the splash screen. He could feel warm bubbles surrounding him.

He felt the sensation of warm water and then it drained away all at once. He felt warm air against his body and then fell forward.

---

"Well?" Azula asked impatiently the doctor as he approached her. He had a neatly trimmed white moustache and his white hair was braided and went to his waist – to the Kaitanni this was a sign of prestige. She had waited for twenty minutes after the receptionist manning the desk on the seventh floor had paged him and she spoke with great impatience tinged with anger.

Doctor Ivasu led the world in cybernetic engineering and as a specialist of the highest caliber; he never talked to patients or their families directly. Lady Ursa and Princess Azula were not merely family; they were the family and his success with Karo would serve him well. The Royal Family and the House of Zhao had deep pockets and had not hesitated to use their resources on the best geneticists and cybernetics engineers in the Empire.

Ivasu cleared his throat. "He has come out of the recovery tank and has no defects."

"All of the cybernetic modifications worked?" Azula asked as her mother and her two attendants remained still and silent. Carly sighed happily.

"He will have to adapt to having wings." Ivasu said kindly as the relieved look literally washed across the faces of mother and daughter. He felt genuinely pleased to deliver the news as Azula had suffered such torment.

Lady Ursa put her arm around her daughter's shoulder. She had come to be with Azula during trying times. Karo and Azula had grown up together and were companions.

Azula wept for joy.

Carly had come with Lady Ursa to the Geelong hospital. Lady Ursa had come to Geelong and had treated all of the humans with respect and shown genuine kindness. Lady Ursa even impressed Sam's mother with her presence. In spite of her regal bearing; Lady Ursa had suffered as well. Carly had grieved for the loss of kindly Karo but she had come to understand the Kaitanni on a deeper level. Lady Ursa feared she would lose her daughter. Azula and Karo were not merely friends. They had grown up together and were companions with a deep bond. If Karo died, Azula would collapse in on herself and soon die. Azula could never bear the prospect of life without her companion. Even husband and wife seldom became so close.

Carly put her hand around the weeping princess. For Carly, this had also been hard to bear. Azula became despondent: she missed Karo so deeply she could never explain it to Carly. Carly listened and Lady Ursa listened and her lavishly red robed attendants said nothing.

Carly knew the attendants were telepaths of great power. They sang to Azula. Sweet songs and music had filled Carly's mind on many occasions. They visited Carly in her dreams. Carly had enjoyed lavish dreams of vivid paradises and wondered if the two attendants were consoling Azula as best they could. Karo appeared in all of them with a pair of butterfly like lavish multicolored gold and red fairy wings.

"Can we see him?" Lady Ursa asked in her quiet way.

Ivasu shuffled his foot uncomfortably. "Not yet. We have checked him over completely but with his new body and all of the new modifications made; he will need some time to adjust. Cybernetics can only go so far: we can rebuild a body and modify it at will but Karo still has to adjust to his new condition. The modifications made required engrams from species with an instinct for flight. Our species can learn how to fly machines, but the foundation or basic instincts to fly don't exist for us. Karo could have the finest genetically engineered wings but he would only hurt himself unless he had the balance, reflexes and basic deep understanding for the mechanics of biological flight." Ivasu had given the odd child of a wealthy noble the capacity for flight but always thought it over the top. He had designed soldiers with flight capacity for the military but such work was very rare and much, much more costly than using aircraft or jet packs. But as he thought 'their money is good'.

---

Karo had begun to wonder if he had died and gone to human heaven: he had wings. Three nurses with hair driers spent the better part of the afternoon drying his new wings so he figured someone – probably that dingbat of an artist had fiddled with his new body. He had not left for a better place but when he checked for a pulse, he had no pulse despite the fact he still breathed in and out.

The cybernetics engineers had rebuilt him in an artificial body. This accounted for his seven week 'coma' as such work required the finest touch and took great time to make the artificial body and make it fit the host. They had done their work well. Karo felt like himself and his body fell like his. He knew this all was an illusion. The complex mechanics of his body had a covering of thick natural skin and muscles cloned from his own stem cells fed oxygen by artificial blood. This explained his wings. They allowed for flight but also kept his body from overheating and shutting down at inapportune moments.

He wanted to leave.

He imagined he had wound up in a hospital somewhere. The ugly green pleather on the hospital beige examination table, the cupboards labelled Medical Instruments and First Aid Supplies gave this away. Karo needed to know where he had wound up. One windowless hospital exam room looked much like any other and nothing in the room gave its location on the planet. He hoped to leave but he had no clothes and his modesty wouldn't let him leave in a red hospital gown.

A young male nurse about Karo's age came in with a parcel wrapped in fine red cloth. "Lord Karo?" The nurse bowed. "I have your clothes." The nurse placed the parcel on a metal counter next to the door and left before Karo could express his thanks.

"A rich source of information." Karo snagged his wing and made the same noise he did when he stubbed his toe. He had four lobed butterfly wings – he could see them when unfolded and he had kind of mastered the art of furling them up. They appeared to be gold edged with red transparent diamonds but he couldn't fully see them. He inspected his clothes and while his boxers, pants and boots went on in the usual way, his shirt and gold edged black vest did not work in the way he had expected.

'Unfurl the wings.' Karo struggled for a moment with his red undershirt and fastened the Velcro at the back. 'Furl the wings – I feel like an old sailing junk. I'll need a set of pulleys and rigging to get dressed!'

Karo decided to go for a walk sill struggling with his vest. The package contained his gold hair decoration and a white whalebone comb. He had discovered how much bashing his infolded wings hurt so he decided not to back into things – ever. He wasn't naïve enough to believe that resolution would take. He began combing his hair. The geneticists had done their homework and his long hair reached his waist. He didn't want it getting caught in anything so he spent a few minutes properly setting it in place in the traditional queue.

He was ready to go for a walk and perhaps if he had any luck left in his little life, find a nice window and stare outside. He knew he had arrived in Geelong and not much natural beauty existed to please the eye but he hadn't seen daylight in nearly two months and he hoped the outside universe still existed.

He let out a howl of pain when his unfurled wings got caught in the exam room door as it slid closed behind him.

Sam had spent over seven weeks in the confines of the hospital. She had never paid much attention to the mandates of doctors and had decided to explore the hospital. She found very little to explore. The beige walled interiors with green tile flooring didn't change from floor to floor and potentially sensitive areas had very good locks or mean guards. She found Karo whimpering as he tried to get his wings free.

Sam pressed the button to open the door and Karo fell forward.

He folded his wings reflexively and looked up at Sam. "What happened?"

"You died of that 'zone' virus before we got here." Sam stood over Karo. "I think...somehow they managed to save your mind or brain or whatever but they had to give you a new body. Azula, Carly and Spencer told the doctors to spare no effort and gave you those wings."

"Oh..." Karo stood up slowly. "Whatever for? Did I do something wrong?"

"Azula wanted to give you a gift and Spencer wanted you to look cool. Carly wanted you to look like a fairy." Sam answered. "I wasn't really in the loop since I got sick from that virus and my brain fried." She tapped her head. "Top of the line processing all the way baby."

"Ow!"While the door didn't exert much pressure on his wings, he had pulled on them and caused himself much misery which only now was residing. He wondered exactly how many nerve endings the doctors had stuffed into his wings and if he would have to put up this kind of thing for the rest of his life.

"If you look closely at your wings you'll see Spencer put his initials on the right top one." In a flash, Sam spread her arms and her wings slowly opened up. "Call me the girl with black wings."

"Can I go back in the pod?"

Sam walked with Karo and explained everything she knew. She had grown very sick, suffered from brain damage and died shortly after they had arrived in Geelong. Karo had his stem cells in the family gene bank which allowed the geneticists and any artistic madmen to muck around with the source code that built his body. Sam had no such luck. She had never had the opportunity to bank her stems cells. The virus had infected her whole body and any stem cells harvested from her would kill the new host so the geneticists did their best using her genetic code and Kaitanni stem cells to build her covering of natural skin. Other than that, she had an entirely artificial body.

Karo didn't find this surprising as cybernetics had allowed the replacement of the biological body with an artificial one but this came with some serious risks. Only in extreme cases such as serious injury did doctors replace a biological body with an artificial one. Genetic defects could be corrected and diseases prevented or cured and a biological body repaired itself.

Sam looked as he remembered her except that she had switched castes. Her black vest with silver trim and dark blue pants showed her to be a member of the Caste of Technicians. Artificial lifeforms had long lived among the order obsessed Kaitanni and Sam had become one of these rare creatures.

"They told me they had recovered most of my memories, but my personality would never quite be the same." Sam said as she walked along with Karo. "What does that mean?"

"I suppose it varies..." Karo said speculatively as he shook his folded wings nervously. "How do you feel?"

"I have no pulse." Sam pressed her neck. "That doctor with the long white hair explained everything to me but I didn't pay attention to the science stuff I didn't understand anyway."

"Living skin on a plastic skeleton." Karo said introspectively. "A typical cyborg has no heart or lungs since they are superfluous."

"Huh?"

"Not needed." Karo answered. "The doctor can explain this better than me."

"Three Laws?" Sam wondered.

"Um..." Karo stopped and looked out a window into the courtyard of the hospital. "I don't think I can properly explain that to you."

"I can't harm anyone."

"I know." Karo watched the palm trees wave back and forth in the small park in the hospital courtyard. "I have seen the joy you find in making me miserable." He had not seen the outside world in such a long time.

"Now I have to pay people to hurt you." Sam had taken comfort that she had found this clever loophole since it meant she was still herself at some level.

Azula tackled Karo in a hug and a warm kiss before he could respond.

"Look at you two!" Carly dove for and hugged Sam. Carly teared up as she hugged her friend and then it struck her how utterly alien Sam had become. Carly let her embrace loosen and looked into Sam's eyes, felt the fine texture of her wings in her hand, then smiled again. "Do you remember the old movies about the Terminator? That old saying was true for you. You are back."

Lady Ursa watched and grinned.