Fleeting Glimpse

by David Gowey

  “I don’t know. It kinda takes all the worry out of it. Like there’s no more sitting around and waiting for it to happen, because you know that it’ll get here soon enough.” Arin would be cheery about this, dammit. Or if not cheery, then accepting, even in the sort of way that didn’t even make room for the downsides. There were always downsides to everything—picking the chicken over the fish, taking one flight over another, rearranging entire planetary biospheres to accommodate human life unassisted by domes and pressure suits—and dying seemed like quite the thing to have its fair share of downsides.

  But in a way, he was right. Rell said she’d wanted notice beforehand and she’d gotten it, albeit on someone else’s schedule than her own. But wasn’t that always how it was? The rogue planetesimal that took out your ship at a decent fraction of lightspeed didn’t call ahead and make a dinner reservation, it just kept on trucking until both of you were a rapidly expanding sphere of radiation in some Oort Cloud. Lightning bolts didn’t RSVP before they lit you up like a drive flare, and evidently Thevashi fleets that somehow managed to get their appendages on human ships didn’t either. They just happened to find you, these freak little gusts of wind, and pick up everything you tried so hard to hold on to.

  Things like Arin, for some reason. Had she been given the pick of the litter back on Khorast, this fresh graduate with an easy smile and nut-brown skin would’ve been too talkative for her taste, almost like a ten year old who hadn’t figured out yet that there should be a funnel between your mouth and your brain. But take that same specimen fifty lightyears out and keep him bottled up with you for a few weeks at a time and he started looking pretty appealing, more so than he already did. Sure, it was disingenuous, even downright exploitative, but it’s what happened on these long-haul missions: you re-evaluated your standards, you hooked up, and then you separated once you got back home and only ran into each other awkwardly at the next company party.

  The only difference now was that there wouldn’t be a next company party.

  “I don’t even know what to say, really.”

  “Shocker,” Rell said, letting a smirk touch her lips to balance out the sarcasm.

  “Right? I mean, what do you say?”

  “I’ve heard starship pilots who know they’re about to die don’t even bring it up, they just keep transmitting like everything’s normal. I don’t know if I could do that.”

  “Well, you aren’t.” More evidence that Arin could snark with the best of them too, when he wanted to.

  “Fair enough. But what the hell else are you supposed to talk about when you know the end’s on the way? Likes and dislikes? Favorite music? Last meal requests?”

  “I just had some chips in the canteen.”

  “See? That’s the kind of idiocy that people think about long before they anticipate they’ll actually bite the big one, but not now that the big one is imminent because it’s superfluous. Who gives a shit what you would’ve done if given a choice when the real deal’s this close?”

  Arin shrugged.

  “It’s that or guess what it feels like to get vaporized by a plasma lance.” He had a point, as he occasionally did.

  They would be guessing, since no one who’d ever gotten hit by one ever managed to send back a survey detailing whether they felt any of the heat transfer before it blasted them into subatomic particles, or whether they even had time for a last mental run-through of all their life’s traumas and regrets in the microsecond between ignition and impact. It was a hypothesis without data, and therefore a conclusion was out of the question. Rell filed it away for a later time which would get here when it got here. Just like the Thevashi fleet.

  “So what do you want to talk about?”

  “Well, hold on. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just put me on the spot and expect me to get deep all of a sudden.”

  “You must’ve been great on first dates.”

  “I was, actually. They never wanted to talk.”

  “Figures.”

  The rain continued outside as it had for the last Earth standard month, or what added up to forty-seven Lorakast days. That kind of orbital period would’ve played havoc with the seasons here if there were any, and the planet’s rotation was so close to being tidally locked that not even the day and night cycle made sense to her. It didn’t really matter where the system’s little yellow sun was in the sky, because no one on the ground would ever see it.

  Oceans of cloud cut off all but the faintest shimmering light from anything on the surface, which kept itself at a balmy and nearly constant seventy degrees Celsius. Left to its own devices, the planet probably could’ve given birth to some fascinating life forms one day, assuming one had a billion or two years to just sit around and watch. Of course, those hypothetical animals of the immeasurable future might’ve stood a chance before someone here had managed to royally screw things up.

  Rell suspected that this presently perpetual rain cycle had less to do with the atmosphere’s high ozone content, as the governor had offered, and more to do with overly eager cloud seeding by upjumped grad students looking to make a name for themselves with some imaginary Efficiency Department back on Khorast. If she’d gotten anything out of the last twenty years or so of hands-on work across a quarter of human space and half that in school, it was that you can’t rush a planet into doing anything. You could beg and plead and beat your fists on the table and pump out all the greenhouse gases you wanted, and the thing would still work according to its own schedule. That is, unless you pushed it too far.

  Someone here had pushed Lorakast too far, and now it never stopped raining. Whoops.

  Now it was her turn to break the silence if Arin wouldn’t.

  “You ever done something you regret?” she asked.

  “Something, someone… Sure have.” Rell looked up at him again when he didn’t say anything else, shocked that he would really attempt to call that an honest answer. “Am I supposed to go on?” She didn’t need to vocalize it for him to get the idea, and just cocked her head to the side instead.

  “OK.” A big breath escaped him, shrugging those big shoulders down a full two inches. “I cheated on one of my last big business projects. Not the huge one that we spent the whole year working on, but one of the other ones that was still most of my grade.”

  “Bull.”

  “Nope, I swear.” He raised his hand as if that would make a difference. “I copied everything and ran it through a scrambler to make sure it wouldn’t get caught by plagiarism software.”

  “No, I mean that’s a stupid thing to regret. Anyone who says they didn’t cheat in college is lying. You mean you never broke someone’s nose when you were drunk or got back together with that one ex you swore was Lucifer in the flesh?” That brought a laugh bubbling to the surface.

  “Can’t say I have. Why?” Rell wasn’t sure if she knew why. She knew she regretted things, and there were plenty of other things that many humans and aliens would tell her she should regret if she herself didn’t, but why think about it now? Was it really that hard to carry on when you knew you were going to die, or was she just bluffing herself earlier when she’d said the whole thing was superfluous?

  “I’ll tell you one thing. It’s really a whole bunch of things but it all gets so rolled up in the job description that I can’t pull them apart anymore.” The little patterns her feet had shuffled into the short carpet below her bed suddenly became a lot more interesting, to the point where Arin had to remind her that she’d set herself up to confess.

  “What is it?”

  “The whole thing. Terraforming. Atmospheric modeling, greening, the salvage xenobiology that really only exists to appease a few consciences with fat bank accounts but that no one else in the company cares about. Sure, I get why the protesters care. But you know what? I don’t. Not one bit. Let the microorganisms adapt or die, because that’s all anything in this universe comes down to. We adapt or we die, and humanity isn’t going to die anytime soon. Not while we still
have even the slightest chance of keeping ourselves going.”

  “That wasn’t a regret. That was an excuse.”

  “You think it’s an excuse because it didn’t come out all neat and pretty, like ‘I cheated on a test’. Boo hoo.”

  “And you think my life was just perfect? That I never screwed up, while you’ve gotta carry your cross of genocide across a dozen planets all by your lonesome? Because that’s what it sounds like. Look at me, I’m a big climatologist, wiping out ecosystems but I don’t even care-”

  Her fist connected with Arin’s jaw before she even had time to see how close it came to being a knockout blow. The next thing she knew, Rell was standing over him as he looked at her in a daze. Whatever was pulling at her to calm down before she went over the edge gave up, not wanting to be dragged over with her.

  “Don’t you dare! You act like just because I can keep all this compartmentalized, it doesn’t mean that I don’t stay awake at night thinking about possibilities. That I don’t weigh the pros and cons, and sometimes fall back hard on the cons. I do, and I have done that for more nights than you’ve ever spent with me. More than you ever will, now.” Her left hand balled up almost as tightly as the right one, only with none of the bruising. “And it’s something I always thought I’d have to die alone with, because I figured no one else would want to hear me give a straight answer that had to take in all the quadrillions of lives that ended—even microscopic ones—so that I could get paid. But it’s not just about me, is it? Or a paycheck? Or any of that shit, OK? It’s about the species.”

  “And you don’t think that’s presumptuous at all, do you?” Arin interjected, now sitting upright again and rubbing his jaw where an angry red blotch grew under a few days’ beard growth. “Taking all this on yourself, like you can just go to hell for your trouble as long as the species is safe?”

  “Of course it is, but I don’t see anyone else jumping up to do it. Not when there are so many of our own kind chaining themselves to terraforming equipment or joining up with the Thevashi to burn us off these forsaken little rocks.” Adrenaline compelled her to go on, but her temper cooled a bit when she noticed that Arin wasn’t reciprocating. Only a bit.

  “So what are you doing here if you think I’m the one making excuses or getting too messianic?”

  “Getting paid, just like you. Wondering how I got into a business where I won’t live see the returns on my work, and that was before an exsen fleet was inbound.”

  “It’s cute that you call them exsens, you know. Really. It makes them sound relatable, which is nice when shiploads of them are on their way to kill us both.”

  “But they are relatable, that’s the thing. Just because they’re extraterrestrial doesn’t make them less sentient, less concerned about the same evolutionary forces that cause us to go rooting around on planets that by all accounts we should’ve left alone. Understanding them as something comparable to ourselves gives us a better picture. ‘Alien’ just puts up walls that don’t need to be there in the first place.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s what terrifies me, that right there: how relatable they are. Because what do we do as humans that’s so special? We roll into some new place, put up a flag, and proceed to tear down everything that doesn’t resemble the comforts of home until this new place is unrecognizable, but that doesn’t matter because it’s home now. Hell, we do that to our own species, so what’s to stop us from doing it to another one? Or what’s to stop them from doing it to us one day?” Rell could feel the tears coming, like waiting on the rain back home, back on a planet where the weather wasn’t a mistake, but now wasn’t the time. Not yet.

  She continued.

  “What happens when someone or group of someones out there decides that they’d do a better job with taking care of all these planets than we do and tries to push us aside? If we were still stuck on Earth, it wouldn’t even be an issue. One largish rock would solve the whole problem. But what can they do when we’re spread out on a hundred systems? Or a thousand? Or a million? And not just clinging desperately to some little metal domes, but really living full lives, out on the surface without suits or shielding? Sure, we might be less a species by then and more a group of a thousand species, or a million, or one for every planet we can touch, but at least we’ll stand a chance. At least we’ll mean something.”

  Trying to stand up any longer may as well have been trying to stand in for Sisyphus. She plopped back onto the bed and then the tears came, messy and in one great, heaving sob. For once, Arin didn’t say any unnecessary words, but just waited until she was finished.

  “This has got to be the least dignified way to go,” Rell said. “Blubbering about my feelings, punching people in the face… And I’m not even the worst off here. You had to watch.”

  “I did more than that,” Arin replied with a chuckle. Now the typing hand was on her waist, and Rell had no intention of pushing it away. “I just don’t want to die angry. Not at you.” She turned to look at him with red-rimmed eyes, not caring anymore that there was probably a little snot mingling with the tears on her upper lip.

  “So are you gonna do something about it or just sit there?”

  Arin did something about it. And a few hours later, when not even frantic knocking at the door could wake them, the Thevashi fleet in high orbit opened fire.

  They didn’t feel a thing.

  Against the Deluge

  “Be careful in there,” Janse said as her brows furrowed slightly. “He almost killed two of the marines just getting him onboard.”

  Lor Prennick was skeptical. The screen above him showed a slight, pale man secured so tightly, it was doubtful the prisoner could even inhale all the way.

  “Not much he can do now,” he replied, and nodded back up at the image. Janse only sighed and keyed the door to open. Lor stepped through and took a seat opposite the bound man. Though Janse had given him a tablet with pertinent information on the subject, he didn’t really need to bring anything else inside with him. It wasn’t about what you read in these situations, but what you felt. Across the room, the prisoner leered at him with an otherwise blank face. The bald skin of his head bore the wrinkles of age—likely over a hundred years old—but no emotion marked those thin lips or gray eyes.

  “My name’s Lor.” He didn’t produce a hand that his partner couldn’t shake, but instead just set the tablet next to his chair and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know yours.”

  “I haven’t given it,” the man said. His voice sounded like a release of steam, with deeper undertones. It unnerved Lor, as if it was artificial. Even after years as an exsen interpreter, he could still count on humans to surprise him in some new way.

  “I’d appreciate it if we could get on a first-name basis. This will go a lot easier if we can see eye-to-eye on some things first.”

  “The interrogation, you mean?” Still devoid of emotion, but not of insight. No one knew just how deep the Lennix Institute’s programming went, but Lor suspected that this was only the beginning. He would start off honest, then. One of the first lessons of empathetic interpretation was to never underestimate the value of even artificial rapport.

  “You could call it that,” he said, and rested against the back of the chair. “That’s certainly what it’ll be if you don’t help me. The guys out there won’t be as nice.”

  “It won’t work,” the Ark Keeper said. “You know this just as well as I.” Lor had had bluffs called before, and this one was no different. The truth was that the marines probably would rather just shoot the prisoner now for all the trouble he’d apparently caused them, if not for the information he carried. And as much as he hated to admit it, the man was right. With the typical forms of interrogation, there was no way that Lor had ever heard of to break Institute programming. Others had tried, and they’d all failed.

  But Lor had an advantage that none of those others had possessed, and he knew of no one who’d ever been able to resist it before. Time to drop
the act, or at least change its appearance.

  “What I do know is that your Institute trains you to resist torture, and I don’t doubt their abilities or yours. I wasn’t brought here to torture you, though. With you tied up like this, I’m sure anyone outside could find a way to fail at getting you to give us what we want.”

  “Then why send you?” the Ark Keeper asked. It was a fair question, and one Lor had hoped the man would ask. He could only tell the truth.

  “Because I’m good at getting people to see things from my perspective, just as I see things from theirs.”

  “Negotiator?”

  “Close. I was actually an interpreter, but I’ve been out of that business for a while now. I learned an awful lot in the Diplomatic Corps. You know what the common denominator was?” The prisoner only sat silently, which Lor took to be a no, or at least a willingness to humor him. “The vast majority of our problems emerge from a lack of trust. That goes for humans and exsens, as well as humans with our own kind. Analyze any relationship you want and in the end, this lack of trust comes down to a hesitation to be truly open with another being, or another society. It’s as simple as that. If we could talk to each other in a more complete way, then we’d have nothing to fear, because the barrier of communication would be gone. No more lies, no more second guessing, just open dialogue in the truest sense.”

  Of course, it was all just a bunch of marketing banter; the sort of rhetoric you’d use to sell your services as an empathetic interpreter or the neural implants that enabled those services. However, as much as Lor knew it to be a daydream at best and a damned lie at worst, it was true in a sense. The only true lie there was the implication that this communication didn’t still produce a winner and a loser. Only one mind could really dominate over another in these situations, and expecting to stand a chance without training comparable to his own was a fool’s errand.

  He wouldn’t have been this confident if he hadn’t seen it played out so many times with his own two eyes.