by Rick Partlow
I looked into her eyes, deep as the sky and right now as frosty as a glacier, and knew this was a battle I wouldn’t win.
“I’m with Rachel,” Pete declared. He was still standing by the door and his right hand rested on the butt of his service pistol. “I don’t want to get stuck someplace waiting around while you take all the risks.”
“I quite agree,” Trint said simply from where he stood beside Pete. I started slightly. I’d been so shaken by Deke’s memory transfer that I hadn’t even noticed the Tahni cyborg entering the house.
“All right then,” I assented, hands raised palms-up in surrender. “We’ll all head to Belial.”
“We’ll still need to take both ships,” Deke pointed out. “There isn’t room for more than three or four people max on my boat.” He eyed Trint doubtfully. “Though I guess you wouldn’t need a cabin, since you don’t sleep.”
“The biological portion of my brain requires sleep, Captain Conner,” Trint corrected him with his usual unflappable calm. “However, I do not require a bed, as I can manually lock my joints in place and sleep standing up.”
“Well, there you go,” Deke said with a shrug. “I stand corrected. Or you do. Or something.”
“We’ll take both ships whether or not we could fit Trint into a corner of the Dutchman,” I said a bit dryly. “There’s no use leaving the Ariel here when we don’t know when we’ll be back.”
“Or if,” Rachel said quietly, not looking at me.
Shit. This was going to be a problem, I could see that already.
“Okay,” I said, “Pete, Trint, go pack up whatever you think you’ll need. Pete, grab us some weapons and ammo from the locker at the Constabulary Station and let Jason know what’s going on. Deke, if you need any supplies for your ship, go ahead and put them on my tab at the port. We’ll meet up at the bay where the Ariel is docked in…” I hesitated, looking around at each of them. How long to pack when you might never be back? “Make it three hours.”
As everyone began to filter out of the house to make ready to leave, Kara hesitated in the doorway, looking back at me with regret in her emerald eyes. I wondered if the color was natural. Probably not. Not much was, these days.
“I’m sorry this had to come back on you and your family again, Cal,” she said.
I nodded thanks. I started to tell her it wasn’t her fault but stopped before I opened my mouth. She was the one who’d come to me for help four years ago, so in that sense it was her fault, and I knew Rachel believed it was.
When there was no one left in the house except Rachel and me, I turned to talk to her, but she was heading for the bedroom. I followed her inside and found her pulling a duffle bag out of the closet, moving with an angry efficiency.
“Last time I left,” I told her, standing in the doorway, “I didn’t have the luxury of packing first. Now that I do, I don’t know what to take.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she grunted, hauling clothes out of a dresser and tossing them on our bed.
“This is my fault,” I told her. She looked at me then, finally, pausing with a pair of pants in her hands. “I brought this down on us when I agreed to help her at Cutter’s chop-shop. I could have just said no.”
“No, you couldn’t have,” she said, her voice and her face softening a bit. She’d been clutching the pants like she intended to strangle them, but now she smoothed out their fold. “It’s not in you to ignore something like that, Cal. That’s why I love you.”
“If you’re not pissed at me,” I said with a helpless shrug, “then who? Kara?”
“No, not even her, really,” Rachel admitted, sitting down on the bed and tossing the pants on top of the open duffle. “It’s just that…you know. You finally had things straightened out, you were ready to retire from the Constabulary next year so we could start a family. Now…”
“Now everything’s up in the air again,” I finished for her, sitting down next to her on the bed and slipping an arm around her shoulder. “I know.” I turned her face towards mine with a gentle finger against her cheek and kissed her. It had taken her ten years after the war before she’d been ready to consider having another child, and now it seemed almost as far away. “This won’t last forever,” I promised her after we broke the kiss as she buried her face in my shoulder.
“What if we can’t come back here?” she asked, a hopeless tone in her voice.
I knew what she was feeling. This was the only home either of us had ever known. I’d fought a war to protect it, gone against orders and risked court-martial to protect it, gone nearly single-handedly against the Corporate Council to protect it. And now I might have to lose it to protect it. But how could I tell her that?
“Rache,” I said, finally, “I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But we’ve been in some pretty hopeless situations before, and we’ve come through it. Have faith.”
She raised her head from my shoulder, a curious look on her face. “Do you still have faith, Cal? Do you still believe after everything that’s happened?”
I had to laugh at that, which made her eyes darken. “What’s so funny?” she wanted to know.
“Honey,” I said, “I am a yokel farmboy from the ass-end of the Commonwealth. With all that’s happened to me, how could I not believe in God?” I shook my head. “I just keep wondering what I did to piss Him off.”
“I’m sure the Council of Deacons could come up with a list,” she said, her shoulders relaxing under my arm and a smile finally finding its way onto her face. “Okay, I’ll try to keep my head in the game. But don’t try leaving me behind again,” she warned me, her face turning serious again.
“I understand how you feel,” I said carefully, trying to tip-toe through that particular minefield. “But there are going to be times that you and Pete will be at a disadvantage. Neither of you has had military training and neither of you is augmented, not counting your arm.”
“Then give us big guns, put us back to back and tell us where to shoot,” she declared, “because you’re not getting rid of me.”
“All right,” I assented, knowing that was a fight we’d have to have later. “Now let’s finish getting packed.”
* * *
The Ariel was a converted wartime missile cutter much like Deke’s Dutchman, but less battered and patched up. She hadn’t left her bay at the port since I’d landed her there four years ago, but the Port Authority was paid out of General Murdock’s account to keep her serviced and maintained. So I was unsurprised when I saw the nominal readings across the board on the ship’s status display and the full load of metallic hydrogen in the storage tanks.
The pilot’s seat felt strange beneath me, the half-remembered touch of an old lover, and I sat back and tried to get re-accustomed to the feel of it. I was alone in the cockpit, for the moment. Pete and Trint were transferring weapons and ammunition from the flitter onto a loading jack while Rachel ran pre-flight checks of the exterior of the ship. Deke and Kara were overseeing the refitting and restocking of the Dutchman, taking extra care to examine her structure for damage from whatever weapon that Predecessor-tech ship had used on them.
I heard footsteps on the boarding ramp and without turning, I knew who it was. I was tied into the ship’s computers and had seen him approaching on the exterior cameras, but my headcomp could have identified him by his heartbeat or his thermal signature.
“Hey Jason,” I said quietly, powering back the acceleration couch before I turned it to face him.
“What the hell is this, Cal?” he demanded, his long, lean face screwed up in angry confusion. He was still dressed in his Constabulary uniform, a pulse pistol at his hip.
“I told you what’s going on,” I said, shrugging my shoulders helplessly. “We can’t stay here and bring that kind of trouble for you and everyone else here. I’m not going to have a repeat of what happened at Mt. Carmel.”
“Not that,” he waved a hand dismissively, his anger seemingly aggrava
ted by impatience now. “You know damn well what I’m talking about. What the hell do you mean by that letter of resignation you sent to the Church Council?”
“Oh,” I temporized, leaning forward in the seat to rest my elbows on my knees. “That.”
“Yeah, that,” he barked, stepping closer and towering over me with the height of an offworlder. “Come on, Cal! You don’t have to do this. I’ll hold down the fort while you take care of things. Your job will still be waiting for you when you get back.”
“I can’t, Jase,” I told him quietly. “I don’t know when I’ll be back…or even if.”
“And you knew last time?” he pointed out, his voice raising insistently. “Hell, last time the whole Commonwealth government was after you!”
“Things are different now,” I said, rising from my chair. “There’s a lot more to lose. We have our world back, with no interference from the Corporates or the Patrol, and I’m not going to jeopardize that.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, looking him in the eye. “Besides, Jase, you’ve earned this job. I only ever wanted to stay on long enough to get things cleaned up so you could take over. You’re going to be much better at dealing with zoning disputes and noise complaints than I ever was.” I chuckled. “I’m a hammer…every problem looks like a nail to me. We’re in a time when we’re running out of nails here, and I’m good with that.”
“You will come back though, right?” Jase asked me, worry in his face. “I mean, if you can…”
“This is our home, Jase,” I assured him. “I will be back…I’m still a farmer, I just don’t want to be constable anymore.”
“Yeah, you’re a farmer,” Jase snorted, stepping away and shaking his head. “You’re a farmer like I’m a native.”
“I am a farmer,” I insisted peevishly. I shrugged, chuckling. “I’m not just a farmer, but I am a farmer.”
“Are you sure you don’t need me along?” Jase asked me. Looking into his eye, I knew he meant it, but I also knew he was dreading the thought that I would say yes. He had two kids now and I wouldn’t have even considered asking him to leave them.
“Take care of the place while I’m gone, Jase,” I said, sticking out a hand.
He took it, used it to pull me into a hug. I’m not much of a hugger, but Jason was my oldest friend so I made an exception.
“Take care of yourself,” he said as he let me loose, his gruff tone undermined by the sniff that followed. “And if you change your mind when you get back and want to be Constable again…” He smiled wryly. “…well, you can forget it! This job is mine, sucker!”
I laughed, leaning back against the navigation console. “Don’t be so sure, Stick,” I said, jokingly using his childhood nickname. “I know where the bodies are buried around here.”
“That’s because you buried most of them,” he reminded me, his tone nearly serious.
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong. And I wasn’t done. Sometimes I wondered if I ever would be.
Interlude:
Four Years Ago
The camera panned outward into a wide angle shot that revealed the tall figures standing beside him for what they were. Thin bodies that still seemed inherently powerful, with deep chests and broad shoulders, stood on long, digitigrade legs. Their arms were disproportionately short, with long, delicate, three-fingered hands, and angled oddly inward from their shoulders. Their faces were long and decidedly inhuman, with deep, dark striations running lengthwise down from large, liquid eyes. A swept-back mane of feather-like hair covered a large skull, hiding any ears that may have been there. There were three of them, virtually indistinguishable from each other but for slight color differences in their greenish-grey skin and the brief tunics that were their only clothing.
They were the same beings that Fourcade had been shown---the same ones Kara had discovered on the outpost planet. I had a sick feeling we were too late.
"I am called Choss," one of the creatures said in a soft, sibilant hiss, "the selected representative for our race to you, our children." Its face was hauntingly animated, almost frighteningly human in the way its expressions mirrored his words. "I call you our children not just because our wormhole maps gave you the stars, but because of a more complex and long-lasting connections between our races---we share the same birth-world. As the scientists of your government have confirmed by their tests, our people evolved on the planet you now call Earth, nearly sixty-five million of your years ago, from a species you know as the dinosaurs.
"In the millennia after the great asteroid wiped out most of our evolutionary tree, the plunging temperatures and changing climate forced us into a tool-using sentience. It took our primitive ancestors nearly five million years to go from stone-tipped spears to our first slower-than-light starships, and almost a million more to discover a method of producing gravity waves which could be used to travel faster than light.
"Once we had discovered a method of rapid star travel, the majority of our people elected to leave Earth altogether, as its climate was becoming increasingly hostile, and we did not wish to interfere with the new evolutionary train that was beginning to take hold. A close watch was kept, however, to ensure that our home world would experience no further such disasters as the one that had wiped out our sister species.
"As we spread through the stars, we found, to our chagrin, that life-bearing planets were rare, and our own intelligence was unique to this galaxy. We began, at this juncture in our history, to take on a task that would become the defining identity for our race. Resscharr, in our tongue, means 'the Life-Givers.'
"We dedicated ourselves to spreading life throughout the galaxy, and to nurturing it to a level of sophistication equal to our own. We began to engineer the climates of suitable planets, through methods your people can only now begin to imagine, making them habitable for us or for any oxygen breathing creature we would later introduce. We did this on thousands of worlds in the millennia that followed our exodus from the homeworld, genetically engineering flora and fauna that could flourish in each ecosystem.
"Then we undertook the most difficult task of all---engineering intelligent life. It was decided to attempt this in two different methods: a slow, more natural process of introducing key mutations in existing species over many thousands of years; and another, more rapid method of radical genetic engineering that combined artificially-grown DNA with that of a native species on one of the few planets with native life.
"The second method was attempted on a world known to you as Zeta Tucanae, and brought about the race that calls itself the Tahni. The first was used with the mammalian species on earth. You, its end result, are our cherished children."
"Fuck me," I could hear Deke whisper beside me, half in awe, half in defiance.
"But before either of our experiments could come to its fruition," the creature continued, "we found that we were not alone, after all. The fringes of our vast empire were attacked by another race of oxygen-breathers---a criminal species that had been exiled from their own galaxy, and had travelled across the millions of light years in a huge fleet of massive starships.
"At first, we attempted to negotiate with these beings, confident that all lifeforms should be united. But these foul creatures were xenophobes, threatened by the thought of any other intelligent life, and they rebuffed our advances, continuing to attack our colonies. As painful as it was for us, we realized that we would have to respond in kind to the violence they had visited upon us.
"By the time we decided to mobilize for war, something our species had not done in over two million years, it was nearly too late---we had been cut off from all of our colonies from the other side of the Galactic core, and penned in to this region of the Spiral Arm and the few habitable worlds between it and the Core.
"In desperation, we decided to seal off this region to keep the invaders from reaching it, creating the gravitoinertially-connected bubble you have named the Cluster. But we couldn't leave our children without a birthright. So we used our gravitic techno
logy to create the wormhole gateways, and left a map of their locations on a world of the star nearest to you. We hoped that we could keep your Cluster safe long enough to allow you to spread through it and achieve your own culture before we would come to meet you as equals.
"Our meeting, unfortunately, was destined to be long delayed. The war lasted for nearly five thousand years, and by its end, our civilization was in ruins. Our population had never been that great to begin with, and more than eighty-five percent of us had been wiped out in the conflict. Our society, built over a longer span than humans have walked upright, had crumbled to dust, and the memories in that rubble were too painful to rebuild. We made a collective decision to leave this galaxy to you, our children, and pursue a new destiny in the body you call the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
"Our opponents we thought totally destroyed. In this, we were wrong. Remote sensors we had left in place over a million years ago told us of a huge battle fleet moving in from a Globular Cluster off the Galactic plane, on a slow course towards the Spiral Arm. We naturally sent probes, and discovered that a remnant of our foes had fled to this cluster and, over time, had built themselves back into a military power at the expense of the environments they called home.
"They have stripped their systems dry to make themselves mighty enough to take back the galaxy they feel is theirs by right of conquest."
Choss paused from his long monologue, gazing meaningfully at the camera.
"Some of you may think our appearance unpleasant, even frightening. Allow me to show you the visage of the enemy we both face."
The view was of a ruined city, once obviously majestic but now crumbled and burning, and still under attack. A disc-shaped craft swooped in low beside a towering spire, paused there for a second before a dazzling white beam shot out of the ship and touched the tower for an eyeblink. The building disintegrated where the beam hit, and the top section of the tower crumbled, toppling slowly to the ground hundreds of meters below.
