First Salik War 2: The V'Dan

by Jean Johnson

  “Aloha, Jackie. It’s been twelve hours since Hurricane Thomas the Ninth hit the Isles. Just . . . just over two hours ago, your tutu, Leilani . . . she passed away. We think it was, ah, first a heart attack brought on by the strain of trying to help everyone get to the storm shelters and get themselves organized, and then a stroke. Ah . . . they weren’t . . .” He looked away from the screen, and the lighting in whatever concrete-lined room he was in gleamed along the edges of his eyes. “We have medics here at the shelter, but they weren’t able to revive her. I know you can’t make it back in time for the funeral . . . so Hyacinth is going to . . . she and your brother Jacques will stand in for you, together. He’ll be flying up from Australia in a few days.

  “Your mother flew in on a government craft, and is out busy assessing the damage. Hyacinth is telling her right now. I stayed at the shelter with Tutu Leilani and the kamali’i . . . Alani is taking it hard; she was with her tutu when Leilani collapsed the second time. Hyacinth says half the south shore was flooded by a storm surge. The schools are going to be okay, but she hasn’t gotten near the house, yet. But we’ll be okay,” Maleko stated, looking into the camera. “Everyone had warning, we all shuttered our homes and got to the shelters.

  “We’ll be okay,” he repeated. “I know Leilani wanted to meet the Empress, but . . . Maybe you can ask if a cupful of her ashes can be scattered on V’Dan?” he offered, attempting a joke. It fell a little flat. He wiped at his cheek, then managed a second wavering smile. “We’ve already had people coming up to us, swearing that if they survived in the houses, they’ll be donating some of the bits of the na lei given to the offworlders and left behind for souvenirs, to spread on the waves during her funeral.

  “Look, you don’t worry about us, okay?” Maleko asked the camera recording his message. “Aside from Leilani, everyone is fine. You take care of yourself, wahine makua. Aloha nui loa, a hui hou,” he finished.

  The recording ended. Jackie didn’t remember when her left hand had left the tablet in the care of her right. It pressed now over her mouth while her eyes stung with grief.

  “Ambassador, is something wrong?”

  Blinking hard, she returned her gaze to the V’Dan screen. The green-striped face of Li’eth’s cousin looked jarringly odd, but the expression on the nobleman’s face was one of genuine concern. A moment later, she felt a tap on her mental walls, and the soothing touch of Li’eth’s mind reaching out to hers.

  (Something has upset you. What happened?)

  (Grandmother Leilani is dead . . . and I’m stuck here, hundreds of light-years away. I can’t go back to pay my respects.)

  (I’m sorry, Bright Flower,) he soothed her, wrapping her in a mental hug.

  The world around her faded into the background, leaving them mostly embracing on the beach in his memories. The beach in her memories, of seeing her grandmother lounging on that beach, running along it in laughter, hauling around a surfboard until her late seventies, celebrating many an occasion with a lu’au shared with friends and family and anyone who happened to be strolling along the beach in front of her house . . .

  (She was a wonderful woman. I think Mother would have liked her,) Li’eth murmured.

  Jackie struggled not to break down in tears. She knew she wasn’t on that beach in reality. She had to maintain control. She had to be dignified . . .

  “I’m sorry, meioa,” she heard the corporal apologizing. “The Ambassador has just received word that her grandmother has passed away, the head of her mother’s family. Perhaps it would be better to continue in a few hours, when she has had some time to grieve?”

  “Of course. I offer our condolences for the Ambassador’s loss. I will call again in four hours,” Ksa’an stated.

  Dragging her attention back to the real world, Jackie opened her eyes in time to see the corporal shutting off the monitor. “. . . Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry as well, sir,” the corporal stated gently. “The comm system on the Embassy 1 is ready and waiting for you if you want to make a call back home immediately. If not, it will remain on standby.”

  “I’m . . .” She wasn’t ready for this sort of news. She needed a few minutes of privacy in which to break down . . . but a part of her knew it would be good for the V’Dan to see how a Terran handled her grief. “I shall go see someone, and . . . compose myself. Then I’ll go to the ship. In a little bit. Thank you for bringing this to me, Corporal,” Jackie added, offering back the pad.

  “Of course, sir. I’m just sorry it had to be delivered. Will you need an escort anywhere, sir?”

  Jackie sniffed. “Ahh . . . somewhere that has some tissues for my nose and eyes.”

  Smiling, the younger woman dug a small, wadded stack of tissues out of her thigh pocket. “My drill instructor said a good Marine was always supposed to be prepared, sir. So did my grandmother, before she passed away.”

  “Thank you.” Rising from her chair, Jackie wiped at her eyes, blew her nose, and headed out of the communications room. She could sense Li’eth headed her way, and decided a detour to the hydroponics garden was in order.

  There, among green growing things . . . and some things that were yellow and blue and peach in hue . . . she would let herself grieve. It was popular with the Terrans now that all but the last handful of patients in the infirmary were safe to go anywhere that V’Dan plant life grew. Someone had dragged in chairs, setting up little lounging areas that annoyed the V’Dan robots programmed to tend the plant life; the Terrans moved their chairs from time to time whenever the machines drew near but otherwise ignored the things.

  There, in the only place that could even remotely be said to be Hawai’ian in appearance, she would grieve. Jackie would grieve, and do her best to get the urge to cry through her system because they were on an increasingly short schedule between this moment and the moment of full, formal presentation.

  But maybe, just maybe, she would ask if she could have a small container of her grandmother’s ashes shipped to V’Dan, to be scattered on the beaches of an alien planet. Her grandmother had loved their home isles fiercely, but even she had been caught up in the fascination of meeting Humans from another world. Leilani had wanted to come here. Someday.

  MAY 16, 2287 C.E.

  JANVA 10, 9508 V.D.S.

  CITY OF THE WINTER PALACE

  V’DAN HOMEWORLD, V’DAN SYSTEM

  Seen from above, the various main buildings and interconnecting structures of the Winter Palace gleamed like a series of necklaces and pendants forged in slightly iridescent gold. They gleamed, filigree laid among a myriad of snow-dusted gardens, which in turn were surrounded by sprawling buildings of a hundred different styles of architecture, if not more.

  “This city has been occupied for almost the entire span of recorded civilization,” Li’eth told Jackie. He pointed at the monitor screen. “The Winter Palace has been remodeled multiple times, of course, but if you look past that escort ship, just beneath it, you can see the sunlight glinting on the bay. And right there, a finger in that bay, is the first of the three ancient lighthouses for the bay. That one has been standing more or less intact for almost ninety-five hundred years.”

  Maria, seated just ahead of them, peered at her own monitor. “It looks like it’s made out of huge stone blocks.”

  “How else would anything last over nine thousand years?” Li’eth quipped back. “It’s said the Immortal chose to build in stone because stone is the only thing that can outlast her.”

  “Yes,” Lars agreed. “But you have to pick the right stone. Pick the wrong kind, and it crumbles like sand. Even sandstone,” he added on a soft chuckle.

  “Imperial Landing Control to Embassy 1, you are cleared for approach to Imperial Hangar 3 behind Imperial First Escort. Do not deviate from your flight path.” The voice came through Jackie’s headset, distracting her. At this point in their journey, answering Landing Control was the pilot’s job, h
owever.

  “This is Embassy 1. Our flight path is acknowledged,” Robert replied, “and we are following Imperial First Escort to our landing site, over.” He tilted their ship to follow their lead escort’s flight path in circling around the edge of those golden buildings.

  “. . . Over, what, Embassy 1?”

  “It . . . means . . . my part of the speaking is over?” he replied hesitantly, while Jackie bit her lip in an effort not to laugh. “It’s a Terran call-and-response thing.”

  Off mic, Jackie muttered, “So many little differences, so little time to remember, explore, and explain them all . . .”

  “We’ll get them learned and explained eventually,” Li’eth reassured her. His cousin had wanted him to descend in a different ship until Li’eth had pointed out that it would be best to have a protocol officer on board for any last-moment explanations, and that it would be proper to honor their arrival by having one of the Imperial Tier escort them the full way to their new quarters.

  “Those buildings are much bigger than I thought,” Lars exclaimed softly. “It’s one thing to gauge distances on Earth, because we know what the buildings are like in size, but this . . . ?”

  “The First Empress did not build small,” Li’eth agreed, eyeing the massive, pyramid-shaped structures. “There, between those two squared-off buildings; that’s Imperial Hangar 3. It’s assigned to the embassies, so it has the least amount of traffic.”

  “It’s like flying over a surrealistic, modern Chichen Itza,” Maria murmured.

  “Only with far fewer trees, and many, many more buildings,” Lars agreed. “Those plazas are also huge down there.”

  “Those are the celebration tiers,” Li’eth told them. “The biggest two at the far end are for the Fifth and Fourth Tiers, then the Third Tier is fully upon the Imperial grounds—the stairs between each Tier’s courtyard can be raised in case of rioting, cutting off access to anything higher.”

  “Here we go, people,” Robert warned them. Their vessel straightened out under his hands, and aimed for a low opening tucked between two flat-topped, iridescent, gold-coated structures.

  “You’ll be in the building on the left. Because your embassy is so large to start with, we’ve moved the K’Katta to the building on the right,” Li’eth said. “They were very gracious about it. Grand High Ambassador K’kuttl’cha said this also makes more sense; she wouldn’t have to trot all the way over to the right-hand building to talk about joint-colony matters with her counterpart among the Gatsugi . . . and then she joked about how she might get fat from lack of exercise. The K’Katta don’t get fat,” he added. “They just either regurgitate or excrete more often. So it was a joke.”

  “If that was a joke, then your waste-management facilities would be the ones getting fat,” Lars quipped, smiling. “A potbellied toilet would be funny.”

  (Oh, great, here comes the bathroom humor. I guess he forgot that this is all still being recorded for posterity.) Jackie sighed.

  (Well, the Imperial Family is not supposed to jest about such things, officially . . . but flatulence happens,) Li’eth pointed out, smiling faintly.

  They ran out of time for jokes. The gleaming winter sunlight vanished, replaced by artificial lights as all but the first of the escort vessels peeled off, and the string of Terran ships slowed and ducked into the hangar bay. There had been some concern expressed on the maneuverability of Terran vessels, since their design was clearly aerodynamic—gliding-flight capable—while the hangars were designed for vertical landings and takeoffs.

  But as smoothly as if he had practiced and run this course a hundred times before, Robert brought the Embassy 1 to a hovering stall via the thruster panels, turned the craft, and followed the portside tunnel under the huge building that was supposed to be their home. Terran embassies of the recent past had often been stand-alone affairs, with whatever patch of ground they occupied being considered a legal part of the nation represented in the building. V’Dan embassies were different, with their occupants being treated as honored guests in the local leadership’s home.

  Jackie knew privately that her fellow Terrans felt this guaranteed there would be listening devices installed in their quarters, no matter what the V’Dan might promise. But since they had yet to establish any sort of international currency exchanges, there was no way as yet for them to buy property and build an independent embassy upon it. The only thing right now that guaranteed them any privacy was the fact that every last one of her people, even the reluctant Lieutenant Colvers, now spoke Mandarin . . . and none of the V’Dan knew that language. Not even Li’eth. Except maybe the Immortal, but I’m not sure if she counts, since she’d have to explain how she knows it.

  But there would be watchers and eavesdroppers. Openly visible as well as covert or denied.

  While their escort vehicle tucked itself into an alcove, they in turn landed on a huge octagon as directed. As it began descending, more instructions came forth. “Embassy 1, your assigned berth is North 5-10 through 5-13, due starboard of the descent elevator. Understand that in the event of an emergency, the lift will immediately descend to the lowest level and remain there, clearing the tunnel for direct escape by all vertical-ascent vehicles. All Terran vehicles have been assigned berths in hangars Bay 3 North 5 and Bay 3 North 6.

  “Acknowledged, Hangar 3 Control,” Jackie answered, since Robert was busy peering at the ships on the hangar floors they descended past.

  While the city up above had looked clean and shiny, even under patchy scatterings of snow slowly melting in the winter sun, down here, the local version of concrete looked grimy from untold years of petrochemical exhaust. There were scratches and scrapes on the walls, fading bits of paint, and sections that had been freshened with brighter colors in recent days. And there were robots in view, sweeping the ground, toting toolboxes, and being of general use. More than the Terrans used, but then it had only been just over one hundred years since the AI War back on Earth.

  The vehicles in the other bays—North 1 and 2 looked like they were reserved for Solaricans, North 3 and 4 for Tlassians, given the shapes of the sentient figures working among the various craft and support columns—came in a wide array of sizes and types, from a couple about the size of the Embassy 1, to a handful of the Embassies 2 through 15, to dozens and dozens of what looked like V’Dan-style hovercars. Some had panels open and parts strewn around. Others looked like they were being refueled.

  Then North 5 came into view. It, too, was brightly lit, but most of the hangar-bay floor was barren, emptied of vehicles and equipment. To the left—portside—as the lift finished descending and jolted lightly, stopping flush with the floor, there were about forty hovercars parked in between the columns in the distance, and what looked like Embassy 4 and 5 parked in the far corners on that side. Six brown-clad Marines stood on the ground dead ahead in front of six more V’Dan clad in red-and-gold uniforms, with cream trousers instead of the usual red.

  Both sets of warriors stood there with their weapons holstered and bodies braced in somewhat similar versions of Parade Rest. A good score or more of what had to be V’Dan staff and hangar personnel stood behind them, save for two figures in bright reflective clothes waving lightsticks to the ship’s right. Ground crew was ground crew, it seemed, regardless of which world one occupied.

  The view of those vehicles and personnel out the portside windows shifted; murmuring more to himself than into his headset, Robert lifted them off the elevator pad. He glided the ship to the right and simultaneously turned it to the left, spinning slowly enough that when they landed, the nose of their ship pointed straight at the lift pad and the cluster of transports far beyond. As soon as they touched down, the lead Marine gestured; the other five snapped to Attention, turned, and moved toward the ship. The V’Dan followed suit, their red boots crossing the concrete floor in unison; the V’Dan hangar workers trailed cautiously behind.

  Jackie ch
ecked the freshly painted V’Dan numbers on the columns surrounding them. “Hangar 3 Control, the Embassy 1 has landed. Thank you for guiding us in. We look forward to the arrival of the rest of our fleet. Embassy 1 is shutting down . . . now.”

  “Acknowledged, Embassy 1. We hand control of your ship over to the ground crew in North 5.”

  Robert and Brad finished shutting off the engines. “And that’s that,” the Texas-born Asian murmured, reaching up overhead to tap switches, shutting off the heads-up display overlaid on the forward-facing windows. “Welcome to V’Dan.”

  “I think that should be my line,” Li’eth quipped. “As you say, welcome to V’Dan.”

  “Brad, would you go coordinate with the ground crews on fueling procedures?” Robert asked his copilot. “I can finish up in the cockpit.”

  “I’ll get started on showing the others which cupboards and lockers to open,” Lars offered, meaning the soldiers and staff tucked into jumpseats in the other cabins of the ship. Some they would know they could touch because those contained their personal belongings. Others were split between supplies that had to be kept on board and supplies that were meant to be off-loaded and carted to their new home.

  “I’ll go greet Captain al-Fulan and his troops,” Jackie said. Li’eth unlatched his harness at the same time as she did, but they both waited for Lars to get out of the way since he was first out of his seat.

  Brad rose to follow them, muttering half to himself. “Join the Space Force. Be an experimental vessel pilot. Meet friendly new aliens, and convince them, yet again, that we just need water for fuel, not liquid toxins . . . I hope these guys—these meioas,” he corrected dryly, “will actually believe me when I say all we want is a garden hose.”

  “I reinforced your request when I heard the Dusk Army’s fueling crews complaining about it,” Li’eth told him. “You won’t have to jury-rig a funnel from the watering line to your tanks.”