by Nick Webb
The defending imperials would not be expecting the boarding parties to have any interest in a skeleton.
He peered out a window as they passed it, and surveyed the massive hulk of a ship that was still in an early stage of construction. Girders and ribbing spanned its length and breadth, indicating an elegant sweep of arms destined to hold fighter bays and gravitic drives. But it was only a skeleton. A skeleton with a beating heart, as the head of military intelligence and Admiral Pritchard himself had assured him.
Pritchard had ensured that the construction of the next-generation battleships in the shipyards were far enough along that at least some of the ships had rudimentary thrusters and at least one gravitic drive installed, along with its antimatter engine. And this one had all three gravitic drives, by the looks of it. He touched the name etched on the entrance to the tube that spanned the distance from the construction ring to the ship itself.
The NPQR Peregrine.
Daniels shook his head. Navis Populusque Romanis. Literally, the ship and the Roman people. Such a shame that they wouldn’t have time to scrub the designation off and replace it with something more fitting. USS Peregrine sounded far more worthy.
They made their way to the bridge through the deserted, sterile hallways. As far as he could tell, there was really only one route there since all the other routes hadn’t even been constructed yet. The bridge door opened at his approach, and he was met by a cacophony of loose wire, half installed computer and viewscreen panels, and only one portable chair.
He took off his helmet, and the rest of Omega team followed his lead. He looked into their eyes. He hardly knew them, but they had his respect. One of the women, a stout, brawny, black-haired girl of no more than twenty, lifted a hand to her forehead in a slow, solemn salute. He stood at attention and saluted back, trying to keep his face stoic.
“Let’s get to work.”
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Green Gifts is a short story set in the Pax Humana universe, set on the planet of Belen. Belen was one of the only planets of The Thousand Worlds that had native advanced indigenous life prior to its settlement by humans. Then, when those humans rebelled against the empire, it was razed to the ground and nearly every living thing destroyed, as an example of what the empire does to rebels. But a few survived, and those survivors have secrets. Secrets that will eventually be used in the war for independence. Green gifts takes place during the original colonization and study of Belen, hundreds of years before the events of The Pax Humana Saga.
Green Gifts
By Nick Webb
Martin glanced up. Nothing, he thought. There’s nothing here, and nobody talking to me. Not that he particularly minded the idea of some company. But normally he did prefer to know who he was talking to.
That was the thing about this post. It was so damn far. Far from home, far from family; hell, it was a three-day drive in the crawltrail just to reach Rionegro to stock up on supplies at the local market (which was really just a shed attached to the bar). “Town” was probably stretching things. From what he’d seen, the bar came first, and a few diehards had decided to just settle on down right next door rather than hike or drive or fly or whatever it was they did to cross the miles of densely wooded terrain out here in the Belenite wilds.
The wind outside the observation deck whistled sharply as it picked up speed, blowing clouds of teal dust across the glass and coating the tower in a chalky white residue, evidence of the ongoing pollination efforts underway in the woods below. Martin shook his head, trying to focus on the data recorder lying crosswise on his lap.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen… He counted under his breath. He held an advanced degree in xenobiology from one of the most prestigious universities in this sector of the Empire, and here he was, surveying the same five kilometers day in and day out. It was, in his opinion, a job that could just as easily have been done by old Nico, who was, as far as Martin could tell, a permanent fixture on the third stool from the left at the Rionegro bar. Except old Nico is blind, Martin thought, Not that it actually matters much in this shithole of a—
TAKE TO ME!
Martin startled at the shout, which reverberated against his superior temporal gyrus with a fierce insistence. He fumbled with the data recorder, looking for something, anything, to indicate that it had registered the silvery voice that had cut through his conscious thoughts and left him with a dull ache above his left ear. If it weren’t for the physical evidence of his own bodily pain, Martin might assume that he was hallucinating the whole thing; out here alone with his repetitive, mind-numbing task, perhaps he was slowly dripping down the drain of boredom, or insanity.
Unless he was hallucinating the pain too. Some sort of psychosomatic response to the unending lines of flora and fauna that he knew he ought to be more excited about, given his training and the fact that they were utterly unique in the known Empire, actual native species on a terraformed duplicate that ought to contain only the original pattern, that of Old Earth. It was mind-boggling, career-making, and he was absolutely forbidden to publish anything, any hint of anything, by those secretive, isolationist bastards lining the senate halls back in Nuevoaire, with their ornamental knives and their ridiculous gaucho pants straining against their bureaucratic corpulence—
TAKE TO ME!
Searing pain shot through his skull. He turned, half-bent in agony, his hands feeling for the ancient leather chair as his vision blurred against the cutting edge of the insistent command.
It was going to be a long evening. Just him and his particularly unpleasant psychosomatic symptom. What the hell did it even mean, anyway? “Take to me.” Stupid subconscious. Couldn’t even hallucinate properly out here.
TAKE TO—
Martin slumped, welcoming the dark relief of unconsciousness before the voice could finish its inane command.
* * *
The afternoon Belenite sun beat down against the brown earth. Carla scuffed her feet against the gravel, slowing her swing so she could jump off. She waved frenetically at her mother, who was on the vidcom again, talking with Carla’s grandma, which meant that she would be really busy for a long time. Carla had seen it before.
She sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her grandma, or her mother, but every once in a while it would be nice if her mom would actually play with her when they came to the park. She had tried talking to the small cluster of kids over by the climbing wall, but her had words come out all muddled, her tongue tripping and stumbling, and the kids had stared at her blankly before returning to their game. Something about running a store and selling food. Something you had to talk to do. She knew she sounded dumb. She always sounded dumb. Which sucked, because she wasn’t. She read everything she could find, even those archaic Earth classics everyone else complained about. She liked the sound of their fancy words in her head. Gave her something fun to think about when the only thing coming out of her mouth was a stuttering gasp.
Her dad had told her to stop trying so hard, to just relax. Just breathe, sweetie. That’s right. In-two-three-four and hold-two-three-four and out-two-three-four. Good. See?
Alone and silent, Carla settled herself against the trunk of a large tree. It was so big she couldn’t even put her arms around it. She wondered how long it had stood here, growing bigger and bigger. Maybe it was really old. Like, maybe it was original old.
Carla knew from her teachers at school that life here on Belen was, relatively speaking, somewhat new. It didn’t seem new, not with big ancient trees growing in the parks, but Belen itself had only been settled 276 years ago. It was one of the first. One of the original planets the humans on Old Earth had found, ready and waiting to receive the colonists who spilled out across the universe, relieving Earth of a litany of torturous problems: overpopulation, overpollution, overterraformation, over-everything, it sounded like.
So, old for Belen was still new for the universe. But that was really hard to think about. Especially when one hadn�
��t been traveling out in the Empire like some of the other kids at school. Those really snobby ones who rubbed it in that they had been “out there” and “seen things.” When you had only ever been on Belen, a giant tree possibly planted by the original colonists seemed really old, and possibly special.
Carla closed her eyes. The knobbly roots rising from the ground pressed against her back and legs. She could hear her mom, still chattering away on the vidcom with Grandma. Something about a recipe for chicken and dumplings that was supposed to be “really authentic,” according to the conversation.
hide
Carla stiffened. She opened her eyes and looked around. No one was there. She glanced up, trying to see if one of the kids had decided to climb the tree to tease her by whispering down from above, but the branches were empty.
hide
There it was again. A soft voice, plinking like summer rain against a corrugated tin roof, with a gentle, corrosive bite. Who was telling her to hide? And why?
Carla rubbed her head. She could feel a headache coming on, and she hated headaches. She always got them after her visit to the medcenter, where she worked with her speech therapist. Lots of exercises involving placing her tongue here, then there, against her teeth and then down again, and swallowing with the tip pressed just so, so that she didn’t accidentally spit or slur her words. She envied the easy speech of her peers. For Carla, crafting a sentence took careful planning, practice even, to get the words out clearly, and in the right order. It was like a dance. A really tiny, annoying dance she had to do that only took place in her mouth.
hide
She knew what she was hearing. Hearing, listening—these were things Carla excelled at. She did them all the time. Forget her treacherous tongue; she could always trust her ears.
So she got up, hitched up her shorts, and walked off into the woods at the edge of the park.
* * *
Arthritis stiffened Papito’s fingers. It always acted up when he sat outside in the garden, probably something to do with the rich humidity that descended upon Belen as winter receded. Better to sit out in the garden, fingers, wrists, and knees complaining, then to be stuck back inside in the common room. The place stank. Too many old people, not enough windows. Okay, there were windows. But that new head nurse, the one from the Imperial Medical Research Facility that had opened in Nuevoaire several years back, she had really taken that Imperial bullshit to heart. He wasn’t sure what said Imperial bullshit was, exactly, but it seemed to have something to do with keeping the windows closed at the care homes. Because she refused to let them open Papito’s window.
So he left. Every day he left his room, his vidcom, and his tScreen—which, according to them, should have provided him with all necessary familial connections and conversations, as well as any needed mental stimulation, through a variety of games and age-appropriate (ha!) activities—and went out.
He liked it out in the garden. It wasn’t crowded. That pretty much summed it up. After his retirement from the Belenite Air Guard, it had taken him only one month with his feet planted firmly on the ground to realize that the only reason he’d been able to make it as far as he had in his life was that he’d spent the majority of his time away: away from his wife, his kids, their kids. Turns out he was a singularly solitary old bastard, one whom everyone preferred in relatively small doses, ideally once or twice a month. The feeling was mutual.
So he’d left again, under the pretense of financial strain from a miserly military pension. Which was partially true: they really took the whole “money is the root of all evil” thing to heart here on Belen, at least ideologically. Or maybe it was the one about “freeing oneself from desire” in order to find peace. Or “the law of consecration.” Hell, the damn state priests were always coming up with some way or another to make sure that everyone—somos unidos!—shared everything. Unless you were in the senate. He’d spent his share of time in uniform, shined up and stiff, staring at the backs of various senators and public officials as they spoke, or awarded, or commemorated. Those senate asses were hard to miss.
He’d left retirement to pilot an ancient ship: pre-gravitics, no railguns to defend against the pirates, the kind of thing no one else flew, in part because they valued—well, their lives. It wasn’t much, just hauling cargo off-world to the port, and the pay was shit, but Papito loved it. He loved being up, above, and looking down through the thinning atmosphere to the rich, verdant planet below. From space, Belen glistened against the cold, blank blackness, her seas dark and her lands dense.
Papito knew that part of what moved him about his home world was her singularity. She was unique. In all the known universe, only Belen had truly welcomed the colonists from Earth. At all the other planets, the colonists had found exactly what the exploratory reports had said they would find: planets in the Goldilocks zone with established land masses and a beginner’s chemistry set of the basic building blocks for life. Those planets were sufficient: the colonists would do the necessary work of planting, cultivating, breeding, and seeding, skipping evolutionary eons as they spread out across space.
But Belen, she had been a surprise. The preliminary reports had indicated a habitable planet, elementally compatible with late-twenty-first-century-Earth life forms. But the truth… no one had guessed at the truth: Belen was alive.
She had surprised everyone with her lush life, her fully formed native life, her honestly extraterrestrial life. Sure, it was mostly plants and a startling amount of insects, nothing like the mammalian strain that had overrun and overwrung old Earth. But it was sacred.
Papito didn’t give a lot of credit to anyone, priests least of all (well, okay, maybe priests more than senators), but even he had to admit that they were right about one thing: their Belen, she was a gift from the universe, a beautiful grace given to a chosen people, a people wandering and far from home, and it was their duty to protect her against the prying eyes of the increasingly greedy and spectacularly manipulative Empire. That was why he had joined the Air Guard to begin with, to protect her. That was why he had flown a rickety death-trap back and forth, hauling trade off-world to the distant port—so Belen’s skies would never see the shadow of an Imperial ship, or a November clan pirate, or, hell, a Corsican pleasure cruise for all he knew.
His rubbed hands, still stiff, beneath his nose. Damn thing was running. Must be his allergies acting up. That would explain his watering eyes too. Getting old, really actually uselessly old, was a bitch. His body was betraying him, and his family agreed that really, for the sanity of all involved, it was best for everyone if he lived away, so their visits could continue in the monthly rhythm they’d held his entire life. So he lived here, in a box, with nurses to administer the meds, a small patch of turf, a bench out back that faced the climbing vines, and beyond that, a small civic park. And that was his garden where he sat each day, looking out, and up.
He glanced down at his space-dried hands, wrinkles overreaching each knuckle and joint. His eye caught a glimpse of a black-tipped leaf peeking out from beneath his sensible cardigan. He shoved the sleeve back awkwardly, exposing a length of leathered forearm. He traced the tattooed vine that began just above his wrist and ran the length of his entire arm before circling his left breast and then branching into the tendrils that encircled his neck. The vine sagged now, stretched thin and fine, but the ink stayed true.
It would. It was from her. The gift Belen gave to every single one of her five million inhabitants. When they reached the age of accountability—when they could understand the sacred life she had welcomed them with—they were brought to the civic temple, where the priests began their tattoo above the left breast. It was a promise to protect her, a promise to keep her secrets, and it bound them together—all of them, even solitary bastards like himself and the fat-assed senators.
Grace.
His wandering meditation briefly halted; he was a bit surprised to hear his own thoughts aloud. Except it was silent. Papito cocked his head to the left. Damn. He
wondered if that bitch of a nurse had slipped him something new. He ought to complain. It was starting to give him a headache.
Grace.
Papito wasn’t what one would call a religious man. He didn’t really believe in much, and he wasn’t that great at things that human beings were supposed to do, like forming relationships and serving each other and all that bullshit. But he did believe in her. He loved Belen through his memories with a fierce devotion that would have shocked any who knew him. Private men, private loves.
