Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  “Markalan?” he asked.

  “One of the aliens was shot. But he fixed it, hopefully.”

  “Fucking mess. But we’re okay?”

  “All accounted for. Captain’s going to bomb the base, isn’t he?”

  “He seems fond of that tactic, yeah.”

  “What happens when these aliens get good enough to wage war?”

  The chief passed a hand along the back of his neck. “The Hub’ll need more jets.”

  “Didn’t we learn anything from history? First species we meet out here and we want to take things they have because they can’t stop us now? We don’t know if they have allies, if there are others. We only know what they’ve told us and it’s shitty translation at best. You want to work out the eventualities of this?”

  “I know ’em.”

  “Then what’re we going to do?”

  “We can’t come between all of EarthHub and its ambitions for space. They want to start mining here as a platform for—”

  “He’d have nothing without my jets.”

  “He’d have the ship.”

  She curled her fingers around the steel bars and looked the chief in the eyes. No doubt the brig was bugged and all of her words went on record, but the angle of the optics could not see her eyes and she stared for a moment at the chief before looking in the direction of the hatch. She saw the chief understand and out loud she said, “I’m not going to be party to instigating a war with an alien species, and every jet on that moon base has made their decision. Consequences and all.”

  The chief nodded.

  The captain kept her in there for another twelve hours and nobody came or went, not even to deliver food. She drank cold water from the single sink in the cell, cupping it in her hands. The drives hummed in that constant low song, as if the ship cast a lullaby to the stars and the moon below, and she grew hungry but lay on the bunk with her eyes shut and her hands over her belly. She thought of Markalan and the aliens and knew that he would be able to hold the base, but he must have been wondering when the bombs would fall, and if that were the case there would be nowhere to take the striviirc-na. The Plymouth had already knocked out the alien communications satellite, so there was no sending messages to their homeworld, wherever it was. They knew so little about these aliens, but the captain thought they knew enough just because the aliens seemed peaceful and not very advanced technologically. There was no patience from here to EarthHub, and she lay there thinking of when they’d first met the aliens and how it had seemed strangely mundane seeing them aligned on the moon in their own suits color blocked in patterns both familiar and strange and she and her squad in their battle rigged blacks and through their helmets they’d tried to discern the nature of intelligence in one another’s eyes. Humanity had long dreamed and conjured theatrical nightmares about first contact and all it had taken initially was a repetitive hello and frequent regular visits until on one visit the aliens invited them into their base.

  She and the captain surveyed the setup of it, that it was not military but scientific, and the aliens spoke to them in a soothing song-like language and they were the general shape of humans beneath their suits, but the limbs slung longer from the narrow planes of their torsos and they moved with an uncanny grace. They had iridescent wings that grew from the edge of a wrist to the curve of a waist and the wings seemed to flutter in emphasis of their words. The humans learned simple words like “yes” and “no” and the name of their people and it was enough for them to glean that the aliens showed them these things because they wanted to be left alone, it was a kind of claiming of the space, the moon and the space around it and the captain had gone back to the ship saying, “We’ll see about that.” No amount of explanation or request to share the space and ally for the resources of the moon would sway the aliens who kept saying, “Wey. Wey.” And it meant no.

  It was dangerous to take affront to things of which they were so ignorant, hanging these aliens up to the standards of human emotions and reactions, but the captain wouldn’t listen and she had lain in her bunk with Markalan after that first refusal and they both had known that no good was on the horizon. “What’re we going to do?” Markalan had asked, and now here they were, and she slept in the shallows of consciousness until the brig hatch opened once again and the captain walked in and up to the bars to look in at her. She stood, and he said, “Have you thought about it?”

  “I gave you my answer.”

  “I’m giving you a last chance.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  He palmed his tags. Her chief and one of her other jets came in, but her chief went straight to the captain and pressed his gun into his back instead, and with his other hand he tugged the captain’s sidearm from his holster and yanked at his tags until the chain broke, and the private went to the monitoring station and opened the cell.

  “Where are you going to go?” the captain demanded as Enas walked out of the cell, and the chief put the captain in and the gate clanged shut and locked with a blink of red.

  She took the captain’s sidearm and his tags from her chief and led the way out to the corridor and through the belly of the ship up to the command deck where some of her jets lined the corridors outside the bridge and she knew the others were down in engineering and the hangar. With a nod to her corporal she walked onto the bridge with a squad of jets behind her, and her chief, and all of the officers on the bridge looked at them in alarm.

  “The captain’s in the brig,” she said. “Hands off the consoles,” as her jets spread out around the bridge and forced the officers and enlisted to stand away from their stations. She looked around and went to the comm and with a swift move of her fingers through the helio controls she called up the alien base, and in a minute she heard Markalan’s voice. Relief flooded her chest, but she said, “I’ve got control of the ship, gather the platoon and the aliens in the dropship and the rider, and come aboard. Let them strip the base for what they need.”

  “Commander Gray,” the XO said.

  She opened the comm ship-wide. “This is Commander Enas Gray. My jets and I have gained control of the Plymouth. We have no argument with our fellow crew and do not want bloodshed. All non-essential personnel are to go to their quarters. If any of my jets see you where you aren’t supposed to be, you will be shot. This will be the only warning.” She closed the comm and looked at the XO. He made no protest and held no weapon. She knew him to be a practical man. “I’m going to need your authorization codes.” All of the bridge crew stood watching her with cautious eyes. “This ship isn’t going back to the Hub. So you all have a choice to make.”

  She met the dropship that the captain had sent to the moon, and that now returned with the rider with her jets and the aliens aboard it. The red-uniformed bay crew worked to secure fuel lines and check the anchors like parasitic fish picking at the skin of larger predators, and the low grind and hollow echoes of activity sounded to her ears as through the depths of a vast sea in which there was no shore. Her jets on guard in the bay watched them, and she walked up to meet Markalan and the others as they disembarked the dropship. He was guiding the injured alien scientist, and the other seven aliens followed in his wake, the white ones holding their black blades.

  “They insisted,” he said, without tone.

  She looked at her jets and told them to take the striviirc-na to medical, so two of her squads did that and Markalan said he would meet her later, after he got the injured alien squared away. So it hadn’t died by their ministrations, and onboard the Plymouth they would be able to take a complete and intensive biological scan of it, and maybe they would learn something more before she had to order the ship out of orbit.

  She walked through the ship, all the way to engineering where the drive towers hummed sentinel and black behind protective glass plating and the crew hunched in front of their stations watched her with her jets standing over them holding rifles. She walked back out to medical and saw Markalan with the injured alien on a trauma table, and th
e CMO was nowhere; she had ordered the woman sent to the brig, stripped of her tags. She took the seven uninjured aliens into the empty CMO’s office and she shut the door and looked at the aliens. The warrior whites still held their blades, and their cetacean black eyes fixed on her, unmoving. Under the office lights and at some angles, she thought she saw hints of opal or gold or bronze in the depths. They barely knew each other’s languages, but she said, “My people will be coming here. More ships. You can’t stay on this moon.”

  They stared at her.

  She drew a breath and went to the desk and activated the helio controls to call up the starmap. She rotated it to show the moon on which they’d found the aliens, and she pointed to the pink dot and pointed to them. “This is your moon.” Then she flicked her fingers at the corners, and she created multiple images of EarthHub battleships, and she dragged them to the pink dot and looked at the aliens. The two white warriors stepped forward and scrutinized the image. They spoke to each other in their own language and she could not understand a word or catch any sound that seemed familiar from her limited alien vocabulary, but when they looked at her she knew that they understood.

  One of the bronze scientists moved closer, and with slow precision he poked his finger into the image and found the moon. He looked at her for half a minute—she thought it was a he, if their physiology had any commonality with humans, but she didn’t know—and he moved his finger in the image until the stars began to move, faster and faster until she lost track of where in space they were, but then he stopped and spread his fingers like he’d seen her do and the stars enlarged, and in the center of them was an indigo planet around a yellow sun, coded in the way of human maps, and the alien lowered his hand and said, “Aaian-na.”

  She knew enough to know that it was the name of their homeworld. And now she knew where it was in the cosmos, that it wasn’t just a planet with a designation yet to be explored. It had already been explored, long before humans gave it some number and the possibility of life. She was looking at that life, and she was looking at the shape her life was going to take, and she did not recognize a single atom of it.

  She met with the chief in the jet wardroom, and he reported that no crew were giving them trouble, but they were all scared and wondering what she was going to do, and she understood that the chief was asking it, too. She told him to keep enough jets on duty to patrol the corridors and watch the officers in engineering and on the bridge, but that she would speak with the company here in an hour. While she waited, she perused the maps on the tactical board, swiping her hand left and right to watch the dance of glowing dots like stardust hanging in the air and rotating and tilting as she navigated her way through all of known Hub space, all the way back to Earth. She stared at the image of the blue planet for a long time until the jets began to trickle in, and she blanked the table with a pat and moved around to stand in front of it and rest her hands on her hips.

  They stared at her solemn and quiet like she was about to either bless or curse them, all of them in their uniform blacks, and as she looked into their faces she wasn’t sure which it was herself.

  “The captain, on behalf of EarthHub, or so he claims, wanted us to fire on the first alien species we have encountered here in the Dragons. This is wrong. I have made my decision, and so have some of you, but in the interest of being unequivocally clear, I am not returning to EarthHub. A court martial would likely be waiting for me, and some of you. But some of you were only following the orders of your jet commander. So I’m giving you a chance to decide for yourselves. I will be transferring Plymouth’s crew to the dropships, signaling EarthHub Command, and sending them on their way to Hubcentral. The rest of us will take the Plymouth to the alien homeworld. They’ve invited us.”

  The silence sat dead and their faces didn’t change.

  “If any of you want off the ship with the rest of the crew, you’re welcome to go without judgment. I’m not one-hundred percent sure what Command’s action will be, but I highly suspect they’ll send a battle group to retake the moon at the very least. We can’t stand up to that firepower, and I can only hope the Hub isn’t bold and stupid enough to scout for the alien planet in order to wage a full out war against a civilization or civilizations they know nothing about. My guess is they’ll cut their losses, they’ll mine this moon, and they’ll get ready for any eventuality in the future. As will I and the striviirc-na.”

  Some of the jets looked at each other. She heard quiet murmurs. Before she could dismiss them, one of the jets at the back said, “We’re with you, Commander.”

  “All the way,” another said.

  “We never liked Earth that much anyway.”

  “We’re jets.”

  They were trained for deep space, most of them were born in deep space, like Markalan. Not like her. But she inspected every one of their faces, her company, and if any of them showed up at the dropships later she would not blame them either. But she didn’t see any of that here and not one of them broke her gaze. So she nodded.

  “The chief will organize an inventory detail. We’ll give the crew enough supplies to get them to a rescue, but everything else is going with us.”

  That blueshift she lay watching out the window in their quarters the solid-black emptiness of space, musing on the unexplored and the absolute unknown on which even her deepest imaginings could find no purchase.

  “What do you think it’ll be like?” Markalan asked, looking at her as she looked out the window, his hand along her stomach where he could feel her breathe.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “They’re a similar size to humans and we can breathe the same air, so maybe there’ll be more commonality with Earth than we figure.”

  “They had no gravity on their base.” Their boots had to be magged to the floor, but the aliens didn’t seem to struggle in the gravity of the ship, at least not so far.

  “We’ll never be able to return to Hub space, will we?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do you think there’ll be a war?”

  It was the question most on her mind, after her wondering about life on Aaian-na, and she had no answer for either of those unknowns. She looked away from the rectangle of black outside the ship and found Markalan’s dark eyes instead and his brow was furrowed in a way that made her think it might now be a permanent expression. She traced one of his eyebrows with her finger in an attempt to relieve the tension and for a moment it smoothed out and the corners of his mouth lifted slightly though no lightness imbued his eyes.

  She said, “If there’s a war in our future, then I want to be on the right side of it.”

  She stood in the hangar bay watching the Plymouth crew load up into the dropships under guard of the jets, when her tags beeped and Markalan told her that the injured alien scientist had died. The captain was standing beside her, watching his crew embark the dropships as if he had some intention to stay aboard and she allowed it simply because she had no desire to humiliate him in front of the crew and her jets. But now when he looked at her she wished she’d kept him in the brig until the last minute.

  “How?” she said.

  “We’re still trying to figure that out. Some delayed reaction to the healant, I don’t know, but one of the white aliens is coming to see you. It—he—insisted.”

  “This will never work,” the captain said, and she held up her hand to him.

  “Let him come,” she told Markalan. “With an escort.”

  “Already done.”

  “You don’t know a thing about them,” the captain said. “They could be taking you to their planet to make you their food supply. It’s all unknown. We don’t even know if what little they told us about why they want the moon is even the truth. Sure they were mining it, but for what?”

  “Probably for the same reasons we want it. To build.” She looked at him. “We saw their food in the base. It looked like game meat.”

  “We could be game meat. Their teeth are
sharp enough to make them carnivores.”

  Phantasms of thought. Left to their own devices, humanity thought the worst. She thought of the weapons the aliens possessed and if they had any intention to feed on humans they’d had the opportunity and nothing to lose once the Plymouth made their intentions clear.

  “If you thought they could be a threat,” she said, “then maybe you shouldn’t have tried to start a war with them. We don’t know the depths of their resources. And now you’ll never know.”

  “You’re forsaking all of humanity for them,” the captain said. “You’ll be called traitors. You’ve lost your own kind.”

  She looked at the man. She set her hand on her sidearm. “The murderer in my sights should shut his fucking mouth.”

  “They’re incoming,” the chief said behind her, and she turned to see the airlock shine red as the inner one opened and shut, then the lock access to the bay opened and the white, tattooed alien stepped through with one of her jets behind it. It raised a hand as if to greet her, but instead it slid something black and narrow from inside its coiled sleeve. It was one move, she didn’t have time to track it before she felt something breeze by her ear, and there came a shout and when she turned around the body of the captain was falling to the deck. His head was sheared clean off his neck and fell beside it with a dull thud, eyes open and his expression slack like he had been caught in mid-thought. The blade that the alien had thrown embedded into the landing gear of one of the dropships and rifles snapped up all around her, some of the crew shouted, and red blood began to crawl in tendrils along the deck from the captain’s severed neck.

  Guns pointed toward the alien. Enas shouted, “Stand down!” before somebody did something that could not be reversed, and she knew as those black eyes locked with hers that this alliance was tenuous and dependent on the next few moments, even if her blood was pounding in her ears and her fingers gripped the handle of her holstered gun when the white warrior stepped in front of her and its head tilted forward. It stared at her, implacable and silent and disregarding the blood that seeped toward its white boots on the deck. She felt its breath on her cheek. It didn’t blink, nor did she, but the scent of the captain’s blood rose to fill her nostrils, and distantly she heard someone retching and another person wept, but the alien just watched her without a word.