by Adams, David
It was embarrassing, yes, but it was in equal measure educational. He'd learnt an important lesson from his fiery defeat and subsequent rebirth as a Human.
Brute force wasn't the answer.
His stolen shuttle sailed a respectful distance away from the Iilan ship and then, with a flash, leapt away to a different world.
It was Augara, jewel of the Telvan Empire. A world with a rich biosphere, carpeted in lush green vegetation and shallow oceans full of multicoloured coral.
And its jump points were heavily defended. The shuttle's sensors screamed warnings as a multitude of systems targeted it. His console flashed with an urgent message in the Telvan dialect: Unknown Telvan shuttle, identify yourself.
The truth would be a mistake, of course, so as Ben opened the channel—his newly reconstructed vocal chords able to form the words of their language—he chose his words, and his lies, carefully.
["I am Captain Melissa Liao of the Task Force Resolution, speaking to you through an interpreter device. I need to speak to the Worldleader of this planet. It is a matter of urgency."]
He waited. The reply was slow to come, but he was grateful that it came in words, rather than balls of superheated plasma.
["Captain Liao, you honour us with your presence. However, your vessel has been identified as a Telvan shuttle. Belthas IV is a war zone. What business do you have here? Are you the herald of a larger fleet?"]
["All your questions will be answered once I speak to the Worldleader, Defenders of Augara. Please make haste. Time is short."]
Another pause, longer this time. Had he erred? Were the Toralii simply preparing to destroy him?
A swarm of Toralii strike craft flew from the underside of one of the many jump point defence structures, and his windwhisper device spoke again.
["Stand by, Captain Liao, we are escorting you in."]
CHAPTER VI
Eden
*****
Planet Velsharn
Velsharn system
SHE DIDN'T KNOW HOW LONG she sat there, her finger on the trigger and her eyes closed, waiting for the courage to pull the trigger and end it all, but it was long enough to pass out and fall forward.
She woke up to a gunshot.
Pain exploded all over the right side of her head. She expected to be nothing—dust in the wind metaphorically, brain matter splattered all over her fine wooden desk literally—and to be so quickly woken from sleep made her flail uselessly and then fall off her chair.
Curled in a ball, shouting and cursing, she clutched her head. Her ears were ringing. When the pain faded enough that she could stand, Liao stumbled over to her bathroom, hands bloodied. She turned the mirror towards herself.
The pistol had discharged against her scalp, burning her hair and the skin below, the bullet cutting a groove through her flesh. She was bleeding profusely; no matter how much pressure she applied, the blood kept coming.
Strangely, the blood and pain helped. Physical pain drove the emotional pain away. Temporarily, perhaps, but it did. Almost putting a hole in her head had made her feel better.
Unlike the ethereal Toralii, or problems over overcrowding and undersupply, Liao dealt better with an immediate problem she could solve. This injury she could deal with. She took the first aid kit from her bathroom and withdrew the pressure bandage, pressing it to her wound. It helped, but her medical training told her the truth. A head wound, even a small one, would bleed heavily.
It would need stitches.
She dared not go to Saeed. Not like this. This had to be something she dealt with herself.
Liao didn't hesitate as she rummaged through her drawers, finding her scissors. She went to work on her hair, grabbing it in fistfuls and crudely snipping it away, clearing around the wound site first, cutting as low as she dared. Then, with a needle and thread, Liao turned her head towards the mirror and began stitching her burned skin.
It hurt. More than once, she had to stop and wait until her fingers stopped shaking before she could continue. But the needle went in, made the stitch, and she became accustomed to the pain.
With pressure, time, and the wound closed, the bleeding stopped. Slowly, more carefully, Liao removed all the rest of her hair, cutting it down to a scraggly few centimetres. It couldn't stay that way, so she used her leg razor to shave herself bald, careful to avoid getting hair in her wound.
Her lack of hair would draw attention to herself, but her military cap would hide the wound.
She'd shot herself. She'd stitched herself up. That was an interesting symmetry to her. A reflection of her dual role as destroyer and creator.
Liao cleaned up her bathroom as best she could, washing the blood and hair down the drainage pipe, then dared to step back into her main office. The pistol was still lying on the deck of her quarters, surrounded by blood.
So she cleaned that too, scrubbing on her hands and knees, erasing every trace of her blood. She even found the projectile and shell casing, tossing the vile things into her garbage.
For the first time she was grateful there were no marines, but a gunshot would travel far in a ship like this. How many others had heard? Nobody had come to investigate, which both relieved and saddened her.
Nobody had come.
Her logical mind told her that this was good; explaining a negligent discharge to her marines would be difficult, but it didn't change that niggling emotional part of her that, in some ways, wanted to be discovered.
Her tablet chirped. A message from Jul'aran, full of typographical errors. He was clearly using the speech recognition software, and it was still getting used to his voice.
The Tehran was due to return, and Jul'aran wanted to make sure the Toralii survivors of Belthas IV would integrate. The language barrier would be a significant problem. After some consideration, Liao sent a message back agreeing to work to implement a bilingualism program. She would ask Saara to teach a class to any willing Telvan survivors.
If they were going to live together, they could not have the population separating into Telvan and Human colonies. Despite their cultural differences, for the time being things would be better if they worked together.
Working with the Toralii. It seemed so hard, and so easy, for her to do. This must have been how Saara felt, healing in the Beijing's medical bay, surrounded by aliens. Choosing to work with someone so unlike yourself.
There was only one thing left to do. Her pistol, still resting on the ground. Steeling herself, Liao retrieved it as though it were made of lava. She could not bear to put it in the drawer again so just dropped it on her desk and covered it in paper.
Just as her cap covered her head wound. Liao masked her pain with flimsy coverings, but they were all that she had.
They would have to do for now.
"Company, present arms."
A military funeral on an alien world for their lost crew. The Sydney. The pilot of the Pegasus. The marines, pilots, and soldiers killed on Belthas IV.
For the billions lost on Earth.
The rain poured down all around her, whipping the trailing edges of Liao's uniform. A dozen marines, comprised of a mix of the Iranians, Chinese, and Americans, even one of the South Korean marines from Belthas IV added as a representative of their nation, raised their rifles and fired into the sky. Their training, discipline, and cohesion was clear. It was a sign of the way things were now; National boundaries, lines on a map, did not separate these people. They were all Human and all in this together.
It was heartening in a way, but they were burying most of their species today. That made it hard to see a positive.
They fired again, then again. Their rifles drowned out the rain for a moment before the dull roar returned.
Ministers said their words, as they had done earlier. She had been asked to speak but could not find any words to successfully articulate how she felt. None of the other captains had spoken, either.
Perhaps they, too, felt that words were unnecessary at this point. Everyone shared their gr
ief.
The Tehran, loaded to the brim with Humans and Telvan alike, touched down earlier in the day. The population of their settlement had increased by 3,000 Humans and nearly an equal number of Toralii as the new arrivals joined their numbers. To guide and introduce the newcomers, Shepherd implemented a buddy system. Each new arrival was paired with someone who spoke their language and could show them their meagre facilities. The Telvan arrivals, however, struggled. There were insufficient translators and they ran out of tablets. Liao had spent most of the day with Jul'aran, the two leaders trying to work out what they could do to ease their situation.
Despite this, she did not particularly like Jul'aran. He seemed officious, and she suspected he had a temper, but he was thankful for the Human intervention on Belthas IV and dedicated to the future. It was hard to ask more of him than that.
Jul'aran was next to speak. He retold the story of the destruction of the Toralii homeworld of Evarel, a story with which Liao was familiar. Saara had told her. The loss of Evarel was why the Toralii opposed other species possessing the jump technology buried in their cruisers and gunships.
The story didn't seem to resonate with her or many others. They had already lost their world, not because of some bizarre malfunction of technology but through deliberate action of an antagonistic force. In a way, it was almost insensitive, but Liao let it slide. It was a reminder of why the Toralii Alliance had done what they did.
Then a select part of the Iranian crew of the Tehran assembled and, despite the pouring rain and the howling wind, sang a nasheed. She had never heard one before. It was an a capella chant performed in Persian, starting low but building as more voices added to the song. It rose higher and higher, somehow working with the pounding rain than against it, the music carrying far despite the noise.
The music was beautiful, but they were only able to hear it because the crew of the Tehran was Iranian. They had escaped through some miracle of geography where so many others had not. They only had four ships, especially with the Sydney destroyed. How much of their culture had been lost?
So many voices from all over the planet were forever silenced. It was sobering, depressing to thinking about, but Liao had always maintained one thing about funerals, and she had been to a few over her career.
Funerals were for the living.
Humans had a fear of death. All creatures did. Funerals were held not for the dead but for those left behind. It was to ease the dark thoughts nibbling at the back of their mind that they, one day, would be dead and forgotten.
They couldn't possibly remember all the Humans who had died on Earth, but Liao tried to keep a few. She brought names and faces to mind, remembering some of them.
Lieutenant Kang Tai. Captain Matthew Knight. Jennifer Pycroft.
They were just names to her. She knew they were living people who had been part of her life, sharing her existence, and now they were dead, but it was hard to see them as anything other than a statistic. She tried and failed. The story of her life.
The nasheed ended far too soon for Liao's taste, but when it was done, she was left with a vague sense of emptiness. As if the souls of those who had died were watching them, judging their funeral as one might score a football game. Was everyone sad enough? Were there enough speeches?
The rain eased up as the funeral began to disperse. With over a thousand people standing in the mud and the rain, the logistics of the event were significant, but slowly the crowds filed away. Soon there were just a few hundred people. Then a dozen. One of the marines tried to convince her to leave, but she felt compelled to remain and dismissed him. He had other, more important, things to do.
She did not need to be babysat.
When she was all alone, she said a few words for Allison. She didn't want anyone to overhear—this was just between her and the stars. No people. People talked behind her back. She had been a famous, well-known person on Earth before all of this, and now she was the de facto leader of her species. They thought the guilt of misjudging the Toralii Alliance was affecting her, that the loss of the Farsight or the disaster at Belthas IV had broken the camel's back.
The truth was none of these. It was losing Allison that broke her.
Every day people looked up at the blue-purple alien sky, trying to see if the Toralii had come to finish them. Every day Liao had looked to see if the Rubens had returned. She was hopeful, then desperate, then despondent as the truth of the matter became apparent.
She had lost her daughter.
So many other people had lost everything but all she could care about was her own child. The loss of billions of people was hard to truly feel empathy for. Large-scale devastation was like that. It became numbers. Just lines on a page, lists, bullet points.
All the survivors had lost someone, so logic told her that she was far from alone in what she was going through, but logic was always the little sister to emotion. They could make deals, compromise, and sometimes even work together, but when big sister spoke, the matter was decided. Little sister would have to be silent.
It was hard to emphasise with the deaths of people they'd never met. She was more upset about Jennifer and Kang than she was about whole countries full of corpses.
Evening turned into night, and the biting alien bugs, so similar to mosquitoes, came out in force. Liao eventually went back inside the Beijing.
The insects of Velsharn had wreaked havoc inside her ship. Dirt and grime covered the once-clean metal floor. The planet was slowly claiming the ship as its own, beginning the process of reclaiming the metals, breaking down the ship into its components and returning them to the ground. It was happening faster than she expected.
The smell of cigarette smoke distracted her for a moment and, wrinkling her nose, she followed the scent.
Rowe was sitting atop a plastic barrel of water, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke into a cloud above her.
"Since when do you smoke, Summer?" Liao asked, unable to keep the frown off her face. "Aren't you asthmatic?"
"There's a limited amount of cigarettes," said Rowe, as though this explained everything.
"So?"
"Well, I have to get my reputation established. See, I'm the engineer, but my talents are wasted here, making toilets and water systems and the like. Nothing technical, nothing to push my brain."
"I'm sorry that the arrangements aren't to your liking, Rowe." Liao's frown turned into a scowl. "In case you haven't noticed, things are pretty bad around here."
"The brain's like a muscle, Captain. It has to be exercised, pushed, and worked in order to reach its potential." Rowe took a long drag of the cigarette, held in the smoke and then blew it up towards the ceiling. "Those robots that the Iilan gave us aren't stimulating enough. They just work. There's no challenge there, and we don't have enough for me to break one apart to see how they work and if we can replicate them. So there's nothing here to test my brain, and that's no good. I need something to keep myself engaged."
"None of this explains why you're smoking."
Rowe smirked. "Well, when they make a movie about the founding of this city, I want the person playing me to smoke, because smoking makes you look bad arse."
People hadn't thought like that for nearly fifty years. Liao couldn't understand what Rowe was yammering about. "A movie?"
"Yeah." Rowe smiled eagerly. "We're making history here, Captain. Someday there's going to be a movie made about all of this. I'm setting myself up to be a total bad arse."
Liao just shook her head. "Of all the people who died on Earth, how did you survive?"
Rowe tipped her cigarette Liao's way. "Clearly, I am bad arse."
"That's a better way to say it than smoking."
"Eh, maybe. Every little bit helps, though."
"Nothing says 'bad arse' like lung cancer." Liao put her hands on her hips. "We need all the skilled people we can get at the moment, and we need them at their best. Slowly killing yourself…" Liao didn't have the strength to finish that sentence.
/>
"Fine, whatever." Rowe stuffed out the cigarette. "You happy now?"
"Better."
Rowe hopped off the barrel. "Yeah, well, we're going to be on Eden until we die, might as well try to get settled here as best as we can."
"Eden?"
"Yeah." Rowe looked at her curiously. "You didn't hear? That's what Sheppard started calling this place, this city. Eden. The name stuck."
"I imagined the garden of Eden to have fewer insects and more apples."
"There's plenty of fruit out there."
"Well, you know what happens to people who eat from the wrong trees."
Rowe snorted. "Stupid crazy religions. I'm kind of pissed we didn't leave that shit behind on Earth."
"People need something, Summer."
"Well they should put their faith in steel, then. In the ships that protect them. They're going to do a lot better than some stupid words to a God who clearly doesn't give two shits about us."
"Ships haven't worked too well so far."
"Better than prayers, because they did jack shit." Rowe tilted her head to one side. "What's wrong with you, Captain? You okay?"
"Yeah," she said. "I'm just… thinking about a lot, you know?"
Rowe laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. "Well, don't let it go to your head. We still got a lot of work ahead of us." Rowe ambled off, and Liao was left with the muddy, grimy deck and the night sky of Velsharn, a black carpet across the open mouth of the ship's hangar bay.
She went back to Operations. Discreet enquiries revealed what Summer had said was true. The island and associated Human/Telvan settlement had unofficially been named Eden. Aside from the insects and the heat, Liao thought it lived up to its name. Quiet. Peaceful. Trees grew thick and heavy, bearing all manner of fruit and birds. The soil was rich and full of edible roots and vegetables, the seas an endless source of fish and mammalian life. And best of all, no sign of the Toralii Alliance.
