by T J Mott
No problems entering, no problems with my fake ID. He frowned slightly. Remember. Your name is now Chad. Fortunately, Commodore Cooper had helped him put together his fake identity, picking a name close enough to his actual name that he would respond to it. And if he uttered his real name by accident while introducing himself, it would be easy enough to gloss over.
Chad, not Thad. Thad is not welcome here. In fact, Thad Marcell would probably be executed if he was caught here.
He looked around as he stepped past the customs checkpoint. The starport was pretty fundamental, lacking in decoration, facilities, or luxuries. Light from Ailon’s weak sun filtered in through the windows on the west end, looking pale and sickly in contrast to the bright sunlight from his own homeworld of Earth.
The people around him seemed to fall into only three categories. Most wore basic, utilitarian clothing, and were probably relief workers, Thaddeus guessed. Nobody came to Ailon for vacation. The second category wore either the dark green uniform of the Ailon Federal Police Force or the brown-and-tan uniform of the Avennian Army. Some of them patrolled the building, their faces hidden behind the darkened masks of their government-issue security helmets. Others stood around, casually keeping guard.
And the remainder, the third category of people, wore simple one-piece cyan jumpsuits made of a thin, cheap fabric, with restraints around their wrists and ankles, shackled up in groups of ten which were led around by men wearing either police or army uniforms. Thaddeus shuddered.
He mentally recalled the maps of the starport he’d studied intently before making the last leg to Ailon, and tried to orient himself to his surroundings. The Ailon Relief Foundation had its own office at the north end of the building, and that was where he needed to go.
He didn’t need to wander around for long. Not many frontages existed within the starport and so the ARF office was very easy to find. Most starports had travel agencies, vehicle rental companies, shuttle services, tourist attractions, hotels, along with a slew of restaurants or other stores. But the Ailon Starport had almost none of that. If you were here willingly, you were either part of the armed forces which kept the planet on lockdown, you belonged to the government agencies that controlled Ailon’s resources and production, or you were a relief worker with ARF.
Thaddeus entered the ARF office and stepped up to the line of agents. A few of them were busy dealing with other arrivals, but the office was relatively empty and one agent motioned at him to approach. He walked up to the window and again presented his fake ID. The agent took his ID and laser-scanned it. “Chad Messier,” he said. His eyes darted from side-to-side as he read something on the computer screen which faced him where Thaddeus could not see it. “Welcome to ARF. It looks like you’ve been assigned to Mobile Clinic 12, currently stationed at the outskirts of the city.” He handed a stack of paperwork over to Thaddeus. “Sign here…and here…and here…thank you, sir. We have a car ready for you in the back. If you’ll just take your things and proceed to Car…” he paused to look at his screen, “ARF-87, the driver will take you to your destination. And thank you for volunteering with the Ailon Relief Foundation.”
Thaddeus nodded but said nothing, grabbed his bag, and proceeded to the side exit the agent pointed to. It led to a hall that exited the starport. Outside was a small parking lot where several small cars sat waiting. All of them were painted a glossy orange and bore livery declaring them to be unarmed humanitarian vehicles belonging to ARF. Their designations were part of the design, highly visible in bold, black-bordered white letters that ran down the cars’ sides, and so he found ARF-87 quickly. The driver stepped out and stowed Thad’s bag for him while Thaddeus examined his surroundings. The air was chilly, very dry, and breezy. Layers of dust coated everything in sight, and he figured it had been a very long time since the starport had seen rain. To him, the light levels suggested that the sun had already set and night was approaching, but the dim, red-tinted sun still hung well above the western horizon, painting the cloudless skies a pale reddish-pink color that was both beautiful and strange.
The driver finished stowing his bag and the two seated themselves in the vehicle. “So, Mr. Messier, what brings you to volunteer with ARF?” the driver asked as he pulled the vehicle onto a highway. Its motor whined intensely for several seconds as he brought it up to speed.
Thaddeus felt a lump form in his throat and tried to swallow it away. “I’m on a sabbatical,” he said. “I wanted to get away from things for a while, and decided to do some humanitarian work somewhere.”
“Well, we certainly do appreciate that, Mr. Messier. Are you familiar with Ailon’s history?”
Thad nodded grimly. More familiar than you will ever realize. He looked down at his prosthetic left hand and forearm, made of a skeletal frame of matte-black alloy, and flexed his fist a few times. It had been nearly four months since he’d lost the hand, but it still ached from time to time. It was a painful reminder of who he had become, the humanity he’d given up, and the people he’d harmed on his obsessive, relentless search for Earth
The driver continued as if he hadn’t seen Thad’s nod. “Seventy years ago, Avennia finished terraforming Ailon and had established a mining colony here. Ailon grew, but the people were never given the rights of full Avennian citizens, and after decades of seeing the fruits of their labor all go towards advancing the lives of those elsewhere, Ailon declared independence. That was five years ago. Avennia sent troops here. It was a brutal war, and Ailon was about to be overrun. The rebels desparately arranged for a shipment of munitions, but the convoy was raided by pirates and never arrived. Now, Ailon is no longer a colony of free people, but an enslaved world where basic survival is a struggle. Shortly after the war, the Ailon Relief Foundation was created by a group of Ailon expatriates who were appalled at how the people were treated, and wanted to provide aid for the slaves here. Now, ARF is the biggest relief organization and is responsible for most of the basic necessities needed for the slaves to survive. Food, water, shelter, medical care…all of that comes not from Avennia, but from ARF. Without us, the people would die.”
Thaddeus gulped. He looked out the window as they took the highway across the Orent Starport, and watched a shuttle as it descended from space and landed. It settled down on the tarmac, its thrusters kicking up a cloud of loose dust, and came to rest maybe a hundred meters from the car. A convoy of bus-like ground transports painted in the brown-and-tan color scheme of the Avennian Army drove up to it. The shuttle’s ramp descended, and soon hundreds of slaves in cyan uniforms disembarked. Two squads of armed soldiers watched on, but even from this distance Thaddeus could tell the slaves had no fight in them. They were all thin, weak-looking, and many didn’t even wear shoes. They moved slowly and several of them stumbled and fell, dragging down their neighbors by their common shackles and chains.
The driver seemed to notice Thad watching. “That’s a moon shuttle,” he explained. “Some of the richest platinum mines in the system are on Ailon’s moon. Avennia mines it heavily to support their tech industry. But they don’t take care of the facilities. The atmosphere and gravity controls up there are not reliable, and slaves seldom last long there. Those are the survivors who are too weak to continue working there, but for every person you see there, three others died in the mines.” The driver looked forward again. “The Army brings them back to Ailon, and ARF medical workers treat them. Those who recover will eventually be sent back into work.”
Thaddeus shook his head. It didn’t seem right for ARF to treat the slaves only to send them back to work.
He looked down at his artificial hand again. He clasped his hands together in his lap, rubbing his fingers together slowly, feeling the still-alien sensations from the crude touch sensors which gave him a new sense of feeling that his mind had not yet adapted to. And he remembered being chained up and held for auction at the Cadrian Casino while his enemies—no, some of them were his victims, he reflected bitterly—spent hours describing the pain they’d gone th
rough because of the way he’d been willing to trample over anyone on his quest to locate Earth and present her with a stockpile of stolen weapons and technology to defend herself from the rest of the galaxy.
And then those people had bid on him. Yes, he’d been auctioned off, with bidders hoping to execute or torture him—or even worse—for what he’d done.
One of them had been an elderly lady who claimed Thad had paralyzed her son during one of his raids, although he couldn’t even guess at when or where or even for what purpose that had happened, a sad note reminding him of just how many raids—against anyone, government, military, even civilian—he’d conducted during his time. And the elderly lady hadn’t even attempted to bid, instead merely asking for punishment according to her world’s laws. And the auctioneer had agreed to it, quickly arranging and carrying out the penalty: amputation of a hand. They’d cut it off right then and there, just below his elbow, on the auction block in front of all the bidders and spectators. They did just enough to keep him from bleeding out, offering no painkillers or bandaging or anything before continuing on and leaving him in agony for the rest of the event.
One group of bidders had been Ailonian refugees and expatriates. The world had lost its war for independence because of Thaddeus’s careless meddling—the pirate raid Thad’s driver had briefly mentioned—and the Ailonian bidders had wanted him tried and executed for his actions. The experience at the Cadrian Casino had changed something within him. He’d returned home a very different man.
He squeezed his hands together, noting how well the prosthetic was calibrated in order to match the strength of his flesh-and-blood hand, and tried to ignore the sinking feeling within him. But it continued to grow, and he looked back out the window towards the slave shuttle as his car drove away from the starport. He watch from the distance as hundreds of weak slaves, many barely able to stand, were marshaled aboard the buses by Avennian Army soldiers. Tears formed in his eyes, but evaporated quickly in the dry air.
I’m sorry. This is my fault. All of it.
