The Voices of Martyrs

by Maurice Broaddus

An explosion, pure concussive force, smacked them like the backhand of God and showered them in a storm of dirt, dust, and stone. All sound became muffled, taking on a looped, distorted quality. The woods erupted in a tumult of fire. A thick haze of smoke rose against the backdrop of flame. Men advanced like ghosts along the horizon. Branson scrambled for cover. Something hot burned through her three times. Her body betrayed her, and her legs began to give out. Blood splayed across fingers she no longer felt. She fell alongside Meshner, burying her face under him to hide her breath. Not every monster was meant for redemption.

  Praise be the blood.

  Voice of the Martyrs

  A mist rose from the cool waters stretching out in front of me. For all of my training, open water terrified me. I viewed open water the same way I thought of God: majestic and mysterious from a distance; holy and terrifying when caught up in it. My body trembled, an involuntary shudder. The migraine following my regaining consciousness meant I was at least alive. Then I vomited, confirming it. My biomech suit was a self-contained unit long used to handling my various excretions.

  Even in the gloom of the graying twilight, my surroundings danced on the nearly artificial aspect of my holo-training sequences. The large fern leaves, a shade too green, undulated in the wan breeze, and water dripped from their undersides to splatter on my visor. My arm clung to a piece of bobbing driftwood, a pillow tucked under it and clutched to in my sleep. Water lapped just under my chin, but my seals were intact. A tired ache sank deep into my bones, and I suddenly felt my true age. Remaining the physical age of twenty-seven every time I re-upped for another tour with the Service of the Order factored into my decision for continued duty. Vanity was one of the many sins I worked on.

  I tapped at my wrist panel. The action caused me to slip from my precarious perch. I re-adjusted myself, half-straddling the shard of log, and bobbed in place. The seconds retreated, collapsing into a singularity of eternity as I waited for it to lock onto the beacon of my orbiting ship, the Templar Paton. I used its navcom signal to map my position relative to our colony site. The terrain’s image splayed across my visor view screen. I paddled toward the shore.

  Memories returned in fragments. Thundering booms. Balls of light. Clouds illuminated against shadowy skies. Ground explosions scattering people. Heat. The confusion of artillery bursts. Targets acquired. Chasing someone. Shots fired. A shelling run toward me. Bolting across a field. The sudden pressure in my chest.

  Falling.

  My biomech suit sealed me off from the world, shielding me from the errant breeze or the rays of the sun on my skin. It filtered sound through its receivers, the noise of which became muted when navcom channels engaged. The world appeared to me on my visor, scanned and digitized. Set apart, I was a foreign intrusion, and, like any other pathogen, the world organism raised up antibodies to fight off my presence.

  I pushed through the thick canopy of leaves whispering in the breeze. A series of sinkholes replaced the metal cabins where our camp had been. Our fields burned to the ground with methodical thoroughness. Animal carcasses torn asunder by blade, the occasional limb scattered here and there left to rot. Insects worked over them in a low-lying cloud. The ways of death and reclamation were a constant throughout the universe.

  Even without the proximity detector, I knew I wasn’t alone. Despite the isolation of my suit, my psi ops enhancements functioned at high alert. A Revisio. Their eyes, too big for their head, their skulls smooth and higher, they studied us with their critical gazes, a mixture of curiosity and mild distain. The Revisio sentry skulked about the remains of our camp with a stooped gait as if he carried an invisible burden. Turning over scrap metal, scanning the rubble, it hunted me. It. Once a mission required judgment protocols, thinking of those about to be judged as an “it” made the work easier.

  Despite its deceiving bulk, the biomech suit moved with great stealth. Dampeners reduced its external noise to near nothing, and its movements were as fluid as my own. It no longer mattered that I had lost my rifle. For up close work, I preferred my combat katas.

  Though I came upwind of it, the native turned at my approach. It ducked the wide arc of my kata, the edged baton bashing only air. It tried to bring its spear to bear, a lazy gesture I blocked. I spun into it like an unwanted tango partner, thrusting my biomech-enhanced elbow into its gut. I grasped its wrist, praying the thumb lock I had it in was as painful to its physiognomy as a Terran’s. Wrenching its arm up and behind it, I ignored the snap of its bone and held it long enough to deliver another couple punches. The creature slumped in my grip.

  “Where?” I asked. This Revisio had no understanding of my language at all. That was why psi ops lieutenants were attached to mission units. Besides security, we provided translation. The metal cap, a socket on the back of my skull, pressed into its place within the suit. Repeating my question, I projected my intent. Spatial concepts were the most difficult to process between cultures. Few saw life the same way. The universe, our place in it, was a matter of perception and perspective. Where did he come from? Where were my compatriots? Were there any survivors? The questions were meaningless, but my intent clear. In the end it was about brain chemistry and interpreting signals. A complex swirl of thoughts bubbled beneath a barrier stifling my efforts. Had it been trained, it would have shut me out entirely. Along with its derisive sneer, I managed to perceive the direction from where it traveled.

  The issue at hand became what to do with the native. We entered hostile relations. Once those conditions were met, military protocols were in effect. Casualties were expected.

  I would pray for his soul.

  My fears for this mission were being realized.

  §

  This wasn’t how this was meant to be, but this was the only way it could end.

  §

  They dubbed the encampment Melancholia as the cyan sphere of the gas giant they orbited filled the sky. The name had more of a ring to it than its designation, CFBDSIR2149. The crew cleared a space for this camp along a crest overlooking a lake. Hastily constructed sheds broken down from the self-contained modular sections of the supply shuttles surrounded a central fire. Test batches of Terran agriculture grew outside our camp, green sprouts rising from dark earth. A thick grove of trees, lush with leaves the span of an arm’s breadth, encircled our site. A mist swept across the ground. I longed to take off my helmet and smell the foliage for myself, but that would’ve broken mission protocol. Once deployed to the field, infantry had to maintain preparedness at all times. I patrolled in my suit. I slept in my suit. I wept in my suit.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Novice Wesley Vadair pulled his blonde hair back into a ponytail. Three days of beard growth stubbled his long, angular face. His eyes squinted in an involuntary muscle spasm, but no one ever commented on his facial tick.

  “What is, sir?” Novices were little more than glorified civilians, but he had mission command.

  “The view. The potential. You can practically feel it on your skin. Well, I suppose you can’t.” He slapped my back in an alltoo-familiar way. Not that I felt it within the suit. He meant to convey a camaraderie we didn’t share. “Professional hazard, I suppose.”

  He was already tap dancing on my last nerve. “Is this your first colony plant?”

  “That obvious?”

  “If I could detect excitement levels, your readings would redline.”

  “Good. Excitement is contagious.” Novice Vidair began walking, waving an invitation to join him.

  “Then, it’s a blessing I’m in this suit, sir.”

  “I welcome your cynicism. I’ll win you over, you’ll see. I’m going to do things differently than other colonies. My dad was a planter. I grew up in a colony like this, so it’s in my blood.”

  “Familial hazard, I suppose.”

  “See? We’re going to get along great, you’ll see. This colony won’t be burdened with dogma. It will be more about community …”

  The novice went on to describe his visio
n, sprinkling it with all of the popular jargon and buzzwords of the day. Community. Conversations. Authenticity. But I knew this story would end the way it always did.

  My parents were the vanguard of “indigenous leaders” novices aimed to raise up. They were killed in their colony. I forgave their murderers. At their funeral, I mouthed my prayer over and over. “They know not what they did.”

  Other indigenous leaders took me in and raised me. Then I witnessed how such colonies worked from the other side. Coming into our neighborhood, planters demanded that we act like them, speak like us, until there was little left of us, in order to receive their gospel. Eventually, their colony plants dotted the land like grave markers.

  I joined the Service of the Order on my sixteenth birthday.

  “What do you think?” The novice drew me back to full attention.

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “Always.”

  “I’ve heard it before. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t be a planter. But planting is what it always is.”

  “What is that?” the novice asked.

  “A wealthy culture sending out well-intentioned missionaries using the gospel to impose themselves on indigenous cultures to create satellites of themselves.”

  “You make us sound like … cultural bullies.”

  “It’s a push or be pushed universe, sir.”

  “And what’s your role in this process?”

  “I’m your pusher.”

  I followed Novice Vidair from the settlement into the valley. He spouted the right words, but I had the evidence of history. My own history. Once in the Service, the Order selected me for Jesuit Training School, officer candidacy. I faced grueling studies in advanced mathematics, Latin (because all alien cultures need to be fluent in languages long dead on Terra), stellar cartography, astrobiology, logistics, strategy, game theory, and tactics. Part of me suspected the reason they took such a special interest in me was because I was reclaimed, a story of redemption they could point to. I was that rescued urchin from the streets with a tragic story. They could pat themselves on their backs for having saved me from the fate of my people. My parents.

  “They know not what they did.”

  The valley was a potential utopia, but I knew that our leaders back home saw only desirable natural resources and a strategically positioned planet. The gas giant, CFBDSIR2149, absorbed most of the radiation emitted by the solar system’s star, lowering the amount of UV radiation, so fewer mutations followed. It slowed evolution, leaving fixed gene patterns. Life took the hand it was dealt and would be required to play for a long time. Whatever life forms that dominated here were frozen midstep on the evolutionary ladder, but the transplanted flora and fauna displaced native species with ease.

  “We’re almost there,” Novice Vidair said. “You can see me in action.”

  “Sir?”

  “What do you know of this planet?”

  “It’s the moon of CFBDSIR2149 of the AB Doradus Moving Group. The planet itself is a gas giant,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, a rogue planet ejected from its system, cradled by its neighbor. But what understanding do you have of life on Melancholia?”

  “I …”

  “Look over there. We call them Species A.”

  A group of natives milled about a cave entrance. Long simian arms rippled with burly musculature. Thick brows ridged deep, inset eyes. A hulking brute stopped and sniffed about, his protruding jaw set and resolute as if he’d had a bad day out hunting. Picking up a stone, he hurled it in our direction. We didn’t budge. Satisfied, he joined the group of other males guarding the entrance.

  “Aren’t they magnificent?” He spoke of them the way I spoke of my cat back home.

  Despite their primitive appearance, they were more human than I felt. Stripped of my culture and my people, not much of me remained. I wore the emptiness that came with a life of obligation and duty without passion and meaning. My neural pathways had been re-routed to accommodate the cap. I could sync up with a computer in order to download information, language matrixes, and action protocols in an instant. My physiognomy recalibrated with each tour of duty, slowing my aging process and knitting tired muscles back together. I hated and resented the Order as much as I loved and needed it. The Order gave me life and purpose. The Service left me without scars, physical ones, that is.

  “Do they … speak?” I asked. “It doesn’t appear that they have reached the level of development necessary to grasp the intricacies of the gospel.”

  “Now who sounds elitist? I’m sure they have some sort of proto-language. If we can teach the gospel to children, we can reach these noble savages. We have an opportunity here, a people in the early stages of their development. With our help, their culture, yes, their entire civilization can be made in God’s image. We will avoid the mistakes of the past.”

  §

  The colony buzzed with excitement at the caravan’s approach. Taking point, I escorted Novice Vidair. Fraught with possible misunderstandings, first contact protocols were the most dangerous part of the mission. Novices were trained to be opening and welcoming, but service members were trained to watch for and deal with threats. My parents had paid the ultimate price for the short-sightedness and arrogance of novices.

  A delegation of four rode beasts similar to hairless horses. Three of them were armed with spears and daggers tucked into the sashes girding them. The last of them wore a tunic of animal skin. This aliens’ musculature was smoother, closer to resembling ours. In my experience, the more a life form mirrored ours, the more nervous I became. Violence was our way, no matter where we found ourselves in the universe. My rifle, displayed but trained at the ground, showed that we had teeth. It helped establish trust as they knew what they were dealing with. Novice Vidair all but applauded with joy at their approach. With every step forward, the novice nipped at my heels. I placed my open hand in the center of his chest to scoot him behind me.

  “Greetings,” the head of the processional said. “I am Majorae Ha’Asoon.”

  As he dismounted, I processed the sounds through my linguistics database. My cap thrummed while reading and deciphering the intent of his words. I relayed the message’s content.

  “I gathered as much. ‘Hello’ is ‘hello’ on any world.” The novice smirked at me with dismissive disdain.

  “‘Hello’ is only ‘hello’ if not followed by weapon fire.” My cap continued to process their language. Given enough of a sample with my psi impressions monitoring the emotional intent of their words, the cap sped up, relaying translation in near-real time. I conveyed the greeting on behalf of the novice.

  Majorae Ha’Asoon turned his back to me to address Novice Vidair directly. “On behalf of the Revisio, we welcome you. You are not of … here.”

  “We are of a far-off planet called Earth,” Novice Vidair said, with the tone of a parent telling their child a fairy tale.

  “You, too, can travel the stars?”

  “Too? We detected no signs that you had such technology.” The novice glanced toward me to confirm. I nodded.

  “We don’t require vessels to travel. We are star stuff. Flotsom carried in the void,” Majorae Ha’Asoon said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Majorae Ha’Asoon kept his back to me. “Yet, you recognize us?”

  “You look like the natives, the ones we have called Species A. Except …” Novice Vidair said.

  “Different. We, like you, are from another world. We, unlike you, have a natural claim to the Derthalen, as we have called them.”

  “What claim?” I asked. The steel of my tone caused Majorae Ha’Asoon to shift to his side, keeping me within his peripheral gaze and making a smaller target of himself. His guards moved in predatory lurches. I swung my rifle to my side.

  “The right of first. We are children of the blue planet.”

  “We detected no life on CFBDSIR2149,” Novice Vidair said.

  “Perhaps not life as you measur
e it. We are … what would you call us? A virus?”

  “You look pretty big for a virus,” I said. My cap continued to whir, locked in a processing loop, as if under a cyber attack of some sort.

  “Floating unicellular things. I suspect, as you would measure it, each strain you would consider an individual.”

  “Some sort of communal intelligence,” Novice Wesley Vidair said.

  “This virus business, I still don’t understand,” I said.

  Majorae Ha’Asoon sighed. “It’s simple. We were carried here on the backs of asteroids. The Derthalen made for natural hosts. Understandable, since we are from the same star stuff. Once we take over, we mutate and spread. Each generation of the virus is a mutant strain of the last. The course of the infection has physical side effects, too.”

  “I noticed. You appear smaller,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand. They … we have evolved.” Majorae Ha’Asoon gestured to his men. “Look around you. We’re not running around naked as beasts. Our form allows us a certain resonance with the minds of others.”

  My cap tingled again. The Revisio’s “resonance” functioned as a low-level kind of telepathy. Each of them had the equivalent of my cap, though theirs operated naturally. Communicating with each other, gleaning information from us, interfering with my cap, it explained why they were so familiar with our ways. It also made them more of a threat.

  “This is utterly fascinating. We’ve suspected and explored that potential in our own kind. There is so much we could learn from one another,” Novice Vidair said.

  “We had hoped you were a peaceful party,” Majorae Ha’Asoon said.

  “We are, I assure you.”

  “You are well-armed for peace.” Majorae Ha’Asoon cast a sideways glance at me.

  “Experience has taught us to be cautious when exploring new worlds and contacting new peoples. Not all missions end … diplomatically.”

  I thought of my parents.

  It was an Easter Sunday service. A group of “seekers” entered to learn more about the Scriptures. Seekers were my parents’ favorite kind of people to talk to as they were open, questioning, and thinkers. But the seekers were actually members of the tarik, a group of faithful believers from a competing sect, armed with an array of weapons: guns, break knives, ropes, and towels. Towels. Because they planned for a lot of blood. No one told me what happened, only that my parents were killed in the line of duty. But the full truth resided in the reports that I had access to once I joined the Service of the Order. The tarik read from the Scriptures before the assault began. They tied my parents’ hands and feet to the chairs.