by David Ryker
“They’re together,” he laughed, tapping Menels on the arm again. “Looks like the ol’ admiral is finally getting some.”
No one laughed. Day would have laughed, he thought. A person stepped from the crowd and stood in front of the admiral. Cavs craned his neck. There were too many people in the way, but he saw the man was drunk and swaying. He couldn’t hear much, but the words Red Hand crossed the room in the space between the heavy beats of the music. He’s going to get hit, Cavs thought. Or worse. Do I really want to warn anyone? It would feel good, to see him get taken down a peg or two.
But Loreto just stared the man down. A steely, unimpressed stare. It broke the man and he stepped aside, staggering, collected by his friends. The admiral moved past him and, with the woman, went through a door in the back of the bar and disappeared.
Hertz re-appeared with a tray of drinks. He set them down in front of the crew. Clear liquor. The kind that cleared out your nose and put hairs on your lungs, he said.
“Didn’t get one for the admiral, then?” Cavs half-joked.
Hertz took a gulp and wiped his sleeve across his mouth.
“You hear me, Hertz?” Cavs continued. “I was just saying about Loreto–”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
There were bodies all around them now, closing in. The flesh absorbed the sound a little and they didn’t have to shout to be heard.
“I was saying perhaps Loreto could join us and maybe his lady friend, too. Maybe he’ll relax a bit.” Cavs sipped his liquor. It burned. “Maybe he’ll ease up on that saving the universe stuff.”
No one laughed. Cavs took another sip and turned back to the crowd, trying to spot anything interesting. Loreto had vanished. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt his head spin. As he peered into the glass, he could smell the potency. He coughed, a big fierce grumble in his throat. His arm shifted backward, knocking into something. Someone, he realized, too late.
“Hey!”
Cavs knew that tone. He knew what it meant when he heard it in a crowded bar. Wiping the liquor from his lips, he tried to ignore the person but there was no escaping his rising anxiety.
“I was talking to you,” someone shouted. “Hey! Fed! Scumbag!”
Cavs looked up. The rest of the crew was watching him. He had to do something. Putting down his drink, he turned around.
“My friend.” He looked up into a man’s angry eyes. “I’m sorry. Really. Here, take mine.”
He offered the man his drink.
“Forget it.” The man flashed a set of blackened teeth. “I don’t drink Fed filth.”
The man’s friends tried to move him away from the table. They can see the uniforms, Cavs told himself. They don’t want trouble. But he heard the man shouting. He tried to ignore it. Looking back at the crew, Cavs tried to repair the atmosphere.
“So, Loreto and that woman, huh?” He laughed nervously. “Never had him down as a girl-in-every-port kind of guy.”
The bar was deafeningly loud and silent all at once. None of the other crew members looked up until Hertz took a sip of his drink, wiped his beard, and turned to Cavs.
“As I was just telling these,” he said. “That’s Ely Pitch.”
The name meant nothing to Cavs. He shook his head and shrugged.
“Nah, I don’t expect that name means anything to you.” Hertz took another swig. “Before your time. But Pete Pitch was a boy we had on the Vela. Decent kid, worked the gunnery detail. He’d have been under you, Jimmy. Anyway, we got into a spat a few years back, some shipbuilders’ uprising on Breton. Hell of a thing. Got bad. We started firing. We won, but it was messy. Shields failed, we took a big hit. Pitch made sure those cannons fired damn well, though. Damn well. In all the commotion, no one noticed the one loss we took. Pitch was his name. Because he wasn’t lost in actual combat, because the Federation is so insistent that there hasn’t been in a war in years, they refused to pay out a real pension.”
Cavs found himself mired in embarrassment but he could still hear the string of insults wafting through the booming room. He can say what he likes, Cavs thinks. He won’t be able to make me feel worse than that.
“Yeah, you know where this is going, don’t you?” Hertz said as he looked at Cavs with pity in his eyes. “The admiral always made sure to take care of the kid’s mother. Always comes and sees her when we visit. This was just after Loreto left his wife, so I recall. To tell you the whole truth, and I say this in confidence, I think he saw something of a son in the boy. ‘Course, from that moment, he was pretty much doomed with the high command. They never liked him much anyway. But when he kicked up a fuss over Pete Pitch? They went ahead and put Fletcher over him. See how that worked out.”
All Cavs wanted was for a fissure to split open the floor and let him fall into the burning core of the planet, never to be heard from again.
“I never knew,” was all Cavs could muster.
“Yeah and he’d never tell you. I was going to put out feelers for the Pale kid’s parents and he snapped at me sharp that the kid had no one. There’s the real tragedy. But he knows. He cares. That’s his problem.”
Hertz paused for a beat. Just enough time for the pit of Cavs’s stomach to fall away in shame. Then he lifted up his glass and boomed out, drowning out the music, if only for a moment. “To Eddie Pale, the first casualty of the Contact War. From the only family he ever had.”
Embarrassed, Cavs raised his glass. He drank and sat quietly while the others talked. He didn’t listen, just marinated in his own conflict. Maybe he’d been wrong about Loreto, but maybe not. He can look after as many widows as he wants, Cavs decided, but that doesn’t change the mistakes. Thinking didn’t help.
All the while, the insults were still coming in a vicious stream. Scumbag. Weasel. Rat. The man was five meters away and screaming. Then he turned on the crew, on the whole Fleet. Scum, the man shouted. Criminals. Filth.
Cavs swiveled in his seat for a second. He saw the man. He had friends now, all dripping with sweat, their shirts removed and their skin covered in the wolf tattoos they liked out near the Pale. They all faced the crew’s table, spoiling for a fight.
“Leave it.” Hertz put a hand on his shoulder. “Just leave it. We’re supposed to be here on the quiet.”
Cavs nodded and sipped his drink and his head spun. He tried not to listen. Cowards, the man shouted. Criminals. Scum.
With a slow hand, Hertz gestured to calm down. Cavs nodded again, stealing a look over his shoulder. The man had moved closer. But I’m a member of the Vela, a representative of the admiral. Even if he hated the man on a personal level, even if Loreto had thrown away the survival of the entire species on a stupid whim, he was a member of the same crew. Family.
Then, the man was right next to them.
“Cowards.” He didn’t need to shout. “I saw Red Hand taking that old whore into the back room. Which one of you’s next?”
Slowly, Cavs looked at Hertz. The man downed his drink and wiped a sleeve across his beard and nodded his head. The sign.
Cavs turned and swung in the same movement. His balled fist hit the man’s jaw and finally shut his goddamn mouth. Behind him, the crew jumped up. Hertz shouted and flipped the table, throwing it aside as his eyes burned the same fire-red as his beard. Cele ran past them, already in the air, throwing her shoulder into the crowd and not caring who she hit. Pyter screamed bloody murder. Menels smashed his glass on the wall and held the jagged ruin in his nervous hands. Cavs smiled.
Maybe they were just like a family. He ran forward into the fight.
25
Hess
Hess entered through the rear of the room, holding his pounding head in his hands. The waterfalls still glistened through the wide panoramic window, the suns threatened to rise over the distant horizon. Silhouetted against the burgeoning light were three figures, lashed securely to bamboo chairs. One of them was Ghoulam but he couldn’t tell their shadows apart.
“Back for more?” Neko teased as he
saw Hess.
The general stood to the side of the three men, wrapping a bandage around his bloodied fist. Hess shook his head. He’d hardly slept.
“Got any more excuses?” Neko asked. “Before I work them over again?”
Hess waved a hand; any head movement ached. He rubbed the base of the skull where the soldier’s rifle had caught him. What’s weaker, he wondered, my colony bones or my excuses? Van Liden had forced information out of him, forced him to talk about who’d been in the room just before the Senate forces burst through the door. Numbers, descriptions, whereabouts; he’d told them enough to play off his presence alongside Ghoulam as extracurricular negotiations and avoid another beating.
The shattered plates and torn fabrics hid the splashes of blood across the concrete floor, but a splintering crack spread across the huge window. Saito’s handiwork, Hess remembered, slowly beginning to realize the insanity of everything. The alien invaders. The destruction of an entire fleet. Military coups.
But the way Saito had screwed him out of the election, that still hurt. A fixed race. His entire life’s work, instantly amounting to nothing. Slumping into a seat, Hess watched Neko drain a cup of water. He’d spent hours working over the prisoners and discovered nothing. The Spartans were unconscious or asleep or dead.
Hess couldn’t decipher the Spartans. Their entire culture was as cryptic as Ghoulam’s smile. They seemed to like and loathe him in equal measure. Their resilience was as legendary as their engineering skills but they’d deserted their leader in the middle of a coup, giving up in the blink of a twinkling eye. The central prisoner coughed. One alive, at least.
With his first knuckle he rubbed the sleep from his eye. The nights were shorter on Sparta. After so much time on Earth, he’d forgotten how it felt to wake up out of sync with the sol clock, at the mercy of the unsetting imperial sunrise. A regular part of life on the colonies, one he’d left too far behind. He looked through the glass, out over the breaking dawn, to the structures and bridges and the birds’ nests built on top of the mountains which seemed so deserted.
His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten properly in days and now his body was weak and tired. Plates of food lay on a table at the rear of the room and Hess picked at the remains. Flat breads and chutneys, vegetables he didn’t recognize, and no meat. Ghoulam’s smile haunted him. He tried to tell me something. But what?
Hopefully, it meant that he’d ally with the Senate against the Symbiot threat. Be cynical, Hess remembered. You’re not as clever as you think you are. They surrendered, despite everything. That must have meant they wanted to be caught. That smile wouldn’t leave him alone. What plan involved the leader being beaten to a pulp?
Neko readied himself. Hess hardly knew the man, one of the president’s least important advisors. Not much clout. But even from the back of the room, he could see the blood on the man’s hands. Saito was probably off somewhere with his entourage, with the hundreds of people he’d brought from Earth. The general sauntered with purpose toward the stirring prisoner. A wet clap reverberated around the room.
“Wake up, rebel,” said Neko in his prissy, Earthbound accent.
Ghoulam moaned and groaned. Hess recognized the voice.
“You ready to go again?” Neko cracked his knuckles, shuffling his feet like a boxer.
Neko was a squat man with an upturned, rattish nose. Another man who loved only his world and his own uncallused hands. He squealed with each hit. The bruising on Ghoulam’s face had swollen up so much Hess almost didn’t recognize him. The captured leader slumped forwards.
“Good,” smirked Neko. “Now. Where’s the Spartan fleet?”
No answer. Hess physically cringed when he heard the next slap. Violence was so… distasteful, so uncivilized. If blood was being spilled, he believed, he’d already lost. He turned away from the beating and faced the wall. He remembered Ghoulam’s unblemished face, back when his eyes gleamed with devilish glee rather than blood.
“Where’s the fleet?” Neko asked again.
No answer. Neko threw another punch. Something about the way Ghoulam sat up each time told Hess that there was never going to be an answer. But, he remembered, the man had admitted that a Fleet existed. Maybe that made Van Liden right.
Hess walked to the window, right beneath Saito’s crack. He drowned himself in the flourishing sun and tried to block out the sound of the beating, like a side of beef slapped on to a metal table. Sparta was beautiful; he’d never heard birdsong like it. He watched the clouds slowly turning from cream to coral to peach.
Just like everyone else, he’d watched the telescreens hung in the communal spaces on the colonies, seen the reports about trouble always brewing on Sparta. They’d talk to a skinny man with one eye and missing teeth, a rebel spokesman, and he’d swear all ways about the Senate. They showed history reports on the Spartan uprisings; schools taught stories of Spartans poisoning the Earth’s oceans; and—always—the Federation prevailed.
No one ever mentioned birdsong or waterfalls. Hess stood on the precipice of the abyss, wondering whether there was anything left he could be entirely sure about. You’re not as clever as you think you are, Acton.
Away, beyond the structures stuck on to mountain tops, the first sun simmered into existence and the birdsong was tuning up outside. Why would anyone want to live on Earth when they could live here? Alien invaders wiped out the greatest human Fleet without so much as a battle. And now we can’t even come together to fight for ourselves? Even in the face of extinction, these factions wanted to squabble and bicker.
How the hell can we survive? He looked down into the clouds and the first rays of light turned them china white and he understood. Me.
Hess drank in the sunrise’s energy. That’s why I’m important. I’ll unite them, like Saito never could, like Van Liden or Ghoulam could never imagine. I just need to get better. Smarter. I have to, otherwise there’s nothing left. He was so absorbed in his private revelation, he didn’t notice Alison at his arm.
“Hess!” She shook his shoulder.
He blinked his eyes.
“Alison,” he said, trying not to listen. “What is it?”
“There’s another one,” she said, holding up her page.
The name ‘Loreto’ appeared on the surface.
“A new one?” he asked. “Did you listen to it?”
“Yes.” She nodded urgently.
“And they haven’t heard it yet?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But it’s important, I really think so. You have to listen.”
Hess examined the glass screen of the page. Loreto wanted the message read, so much so that he’d sent it to every high-ranking address in the Senate, unencrypted.
“Fine.” Hess tried to ignore Neko’s violence. “But not here.”
He wanted to listen first. If there was any valuable information, he should be in control of it. The violent sounds stopped. Neko leaned back against a wall, out of breath. Through bloody teeth, Ghoulam laughed. The sun had heaved free from the horizon, pouring light through the window, washing over his body.
Neko growled and pushed himself forward, taking the momentum right into a punch. Ghoulam’s head snapped around and a tooth jingled across the hard floor and bounced in front of Hess. The Spartan laughed again. Alison stood with her hand over her mouth. It wasn’t just the sight, Hess sympathized, it was the blood and sweat on the air. He could practically taste the beating in the back of his throat.
“Something’s wrong with him.” Neko glared at his prisoner, speaking into his page.
“He’s not talking?” The other voice sounded like Van Liden.
“He’s laughing.”
“Keep working him.” The unseen speaker paused long enough for a drag. “Our Fleet’s approaching the trace gate. Get that information.”
Neko stuffed the page back in his pocket and sipped more water. The room was so large, every sound echoing. Ghoulam’s laugh clogged in his throat, bubbling with blood. The Spartan lo
oked around with puffed-up eyes and stared straight out the window, directly into the sun. He’s taking in energy, Hess thought. The man’s ability to take a beating was incredible.
“What’s that?” said Alison, standing by the window.
The susurrating sound of the bamboo door opening didn’t mask the footsteps. Saito and Van Liden entered, flanked by soldiers. Hess glimpsed a squadron of men outside, guarding the room. Where are the Spartans? They didn’t care about their captured leader; it astonished him. Alison laid her flat hand up against the cracked window.
“There!” she said, tapping the glass.
Behind them, Neko tried to explain himself to the president. Hess squinted and saw distant silhouettes against the sun.
“Hess?” Saito stifled a yawn. “Getting a first-hand look at Federation justice, are you?”
The clogging, choking sound of Ghoulam’s laughter grew louder, burbling through his bloody mouth.
“We should move.” Alison tugged at Hess’s arm.
But he stood still, caught under the spell of the shadows flying out of the sun.
“Come on!” Alison begged.
He heard Alison running away without him. Ghoulam began swaying side to side in his chair, nearly toppling. Stepping closer to the window, Hess stared between the cracks until, finally, he saw a formation of six Spartan fighters, flying in a tight knot.
“They’re coming right for–” he stopped and began to move.
He ran behind Alison, the pair of them ducking beside a concrete Spartan bench. He hit the ground hard, landing next to her. Ghoulam toppled in his seat, knocking the two Spartans to the floor with him.
“Van Liden.” Saito looked out the window. “What the hell–”
The cannon roared. The window held for a moment and then shattered. Glass shards rained down and Hess covered Alison with his body, pressing them both into the ground. The room exploded in a hail of energy bolts, thumping into the thick, flat walls over their heads. Saito and the soldiers vanished.
