Nuts chuckled. “Oh I think we can come up with tech for that. Picture a palpable 6-D holo experience where you’ll only get your feast-o-blood after chasing and conquering an ersatz victim. So realistic you’ll all have a great old time, concocting game scenarios that even lots of Standards will want to play, so long as they don’t die in the outcome.”

Earl and Lorg looked unconvinced, till Ping murmured, facing in turn each of the undead representatives.

“Our ancestors made peace under harsher conditions than these. Are you, our own dear-recently-departed, made of lesser stuff?”

Again, silence as they pondered this, though clearly his challenge moved them.

Finally, the zombie Moulder summed things up eloquently, as Sully kept his head propped upright on the table.

“Braainss for all… Braaainss for every body!”

And with that he began to hum a deeply resonant tune, like the one I once listened-to that evening long ago, in the Cal’mari cemetery, moaned by ‘advanced’ zombies as they serenaded the moon. My crewmates – especially the demmies – were captivated by the sound, having never heard anything like it in all their cosmic journeys. Moreover, the melody was entirely original. Of that I felt sure. Moulder was doing decomposing right there, before us.

Oh, I am going to hunt down the demmie who made these punning nanos in my ears, I recall thinking, amid the beauty of the moment. He is so gonna die!

Of course, our brilliant scheme to save Cal’mari and the rest of civilization on Planet Squid hinged on one thing. In order to accomplish all of this, we needed access to the Big Computer.

Only then could the right dose of Leininger factor be adjusted, so that the undead races would not be made extinct – but their frenzied appetites be kept limited, letting them adjust to a new era of synthetic food, so that the undead could stop inflicting death.

Moreover, Commander Talon had other reasons to urge some degree of haste. “We need to depart in less than a month, both in order to inform the Alliance of many important matters, and to get reinforcements sent out here. Any longer could result in real problems.”

Unspoken was the fact that – with the exception of the original landing party – our ship’s crew had been away from home not for months, but many years of subjective time. I fizzed with curiosity about that story, which was likely to be epic. But of one thing I felt already certain. The pay and benefits accountants back at base were not going to be happy, for sure.