Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “Please supply lunar fire control code word.” The AI said. Lasers touched the St. John from all sides and Samuel felt the ships internal temperature skyrocket as heat radiated out from the contact points at a rate faster than the thermal dump filaments could keep up with. A timer in the corner of his display gave him a calculated length of time they could survive the onslaught at nine seconds and dropping.

  “Armageddon.” Samuel replied. Even as he said it he looked up at the scar on the moon left by the St. Matthew when a laser knocked the engines out of control and drove it, nose first into the surface. A monument to Yammaro’s memory no one would ever have a chance to see again. He thought of his son, the little boy he’d seen in the girls arms from a distance, before he left. He didn’t have a picture of them so he pulled up a picture of Marain instead. The planet was beautiful, a glowing blue sphere marred only by the wisps of clouds and the single enormous brilliant green continent on which his son would be raised. He wondered if they would tell the boy about him.

  “Fire control confirmed, proceed?”

  “Give them hell.” Samuel wheezed as he flicked the picture away and felt tears prick his eyes.

  He was just an asshole, our defender, just an asshole.

  At the AI’s signal dozens of antimatter chambers across the moonlet’s surface opened and blew pillars of solid antimatter straight to the core of the planet. There they met they expanded to consume the planet. At the four second mark the moon blew apart as the explosion reached the surface.

  Where the St. Matthew had gone down one of the chambers failed to fire initially and the explosion blew out that section of the planet like a slug of stone from a moon sized cannon. Through the haze of acceleration tears that still hadn’t stopped their leakage from his eyes, Samuel saw two of the Kamele ships pulverized by a wave of stones the size of small cities. Each ship ignited into a sphere of blinding fire as their fuel containment chambers were breached and antimatter leaked out into the cosmos where more stones found them and were turned into novas.

  “Give them hell.” Samuel wheezed again.

  The laser fire stopped as the invaders turned to flee, but by that time the damage had been done. After five seconds of fire from the combined laser beams the St. John’s thermal load had passed the safety margin in which he could safely operate the primary engine. After six seconds electronics along the outside shell of the ship had begun to melt and at seven the lasers switched off. Two more seconds and he would have been dead. Only two more, and there would be no more thoughts of, prosthetics, or family, or the girl he’d left behind forever.

  Forever. Only two more seconds would have done it. In a few hours the dump filaments might have lowered the temperature within the safety margin, but for those few hours, for these few minutes, the St. John was little more than an astronomical coffin drifting in the path of a storm of boulders, filled with little more than a dead man and the insane hope, he could not kill, that somehow, some way, forever would never come to take him away from his view of the planet which had betrayed him and the thought of all those living on it whom he had failed.

  Chapter 1: Moses // A Philosophy for Life

  Moses could remember the exact day he realized he wanted to die. The day was warm and bright, and his father had given him some free time from tending the Porqine to wander to the swimming hole at the foot of the overshadowing hills. He was nineteen, old enough to have passed the teenage angst a few of his brothers still struggled with, but young enough to still enjoy a few hours free time to swim in the chilly mountain water and bask on a sun warmed rock overlooking their narrow valley while his mind wandered. It was an idle thought that tipped him off, an idle thought and weeks of personal reflection from time spent busy with the chores of the family homestead.

  “Have you thought about starting your own homestead?” His father had asked him several days before.This was before the death of the four evangelists was broadcast across all of Marain, before the Kamele invasion lit up the sky at night. The two of them were carrying nets of various mosses and lichens over their shoulder as they walked through Marain’s jungle of short palm like trees. The nets were made of woven fronds that cut their bare palms if held too long. To prevent this they carried them on sticks over their shoulder and bounced them with every step in order to scatter spores from the collection of plants in the nets across the acres of jungle which they maintained. The Cato fungus depended upon those varieties to keep the jungle floor covered and damp, an ideal environment for the rot and loam its miles of subterranean mycelium consumed, an environment jeopardized by the family’s small stock of chickens and their unending effort to consume anything green they could get their beaks into.

  Moses shook his head. He’d thought of running away once but Cardino had taught him to be ashamed of that desire. He’d accepted life with his family ever since, for all the ups and downs and petty aggravations. After the attempt, and Cardino’s intervention, Moses had come back to stay, for as long as that meant staying.

  “Wouldn’t have to be so far away and secluded the way we are.” Moses’ father said. “Could build it just a little ways down the valley. There’s a bunch of Porqine and Cato blooms there we’ve never been able to harvest. It would make starting easy for you, we could even help you dig your hogan, get you set up, you know. If you wanted.”

  Silence followed the suggestion as they pushed through the dense undergrowth. Hip high ferns and thick carpets of moss whispered at them as they wove through the jungle and they continued to shake their nets while Moses considered the idea. They reached a stream where they were accustomed to pausing for lunch and his father squeezed his shoulder as they unslung the nets and stretched out on the more comfortable boulders.

  “Wouldn’t have to build a homestead neither if you didn’t want to. If you want to follow Cardino to the seminary, or go to Quinn city to try out for the corporation, I’d understand. But if you did want to start a homestead, I’d be, well, me and your mother wouldn’t mind that neither. And I could help you start, get you on your feet some, and maybe give you some space. I was your age when I came out here. Same as your mother. Figured you might be getting ready to move out on your own too. That’s all. There’s no hurry. But you can talk to me in your own time. Just wanted to… bring it up I spose.” He squeezed Moses shoulder again. “That’s all.”Then Moses was left to his egg sponge in its sibsig frond wrap while the water washed by beside him, an occasional fish swimming up the current in a loose knot of dark tentacles.

  Moses was not afraid of change. No, he refused to be afraid of change, change was part of life. Change was Cardino leaving for Carmichael. Change was Joseph being born, and Moses receiving the responsibility of the Porqine harvest and his own harvest knife. Change was adding on to the family hogan, learning to brew mitchel beer from the sibsig sap and meeting the traders at the outpost who would give them bags of Cherri flour, or charged batteries for the cube, or blankets, or pots and pans, axes and knives, or any other thing they could possibly need on the homestead in exchange for the barrels. Change could be his own hogan, his own chance to build the life he wanted out here in this wilderness.

  No, he wasn’t afraid of change, it was the wanting part that made him uncertain. No one had ever asked him what he wanted. Not like this. Not with the tantalizing possibility that everything did not have to be exactly as they’d always been, that there might be something different beyond the valley which he could try. It was the same tantalizing possibility that had taunted him when he’d dreamed of running away, the same dream he was ashamed of now. To want.

  The question chased him for the next few weeks. True to his word, his father never brought it up again, but Moses found himself asking those questions again while he did his chores and helped around the hogan. He’d sit atop the sporocarp of one of the mound shroom blooms they called Cato Fungus in the jungle and watch porqine wander ponderously around the fungal structure. They found fresh sheaths of growth and latched on to chew and he would
think “These could be my porqine” while he watched for predatory Catoblepas. He would move the woven frond mats on the roof while his father yelled directions from inside and think “I could be repairing my own hogan after winter.” Somehow the thought didn’t give him any pride and that fact disquieted him. It just sounded like work, long pointless hours of work and for what? Nothing? But what had he done all his life if it was true? Had he been right to think about running away? And if he didn’t run away now, would it be so bad, to live without… purpose? A long life of one uninterrupted daily, monthly, seasonal routine at the hogan? His parents’ hogan now, but eventually, his own?

  “We were made to love and serve the Lord.” Father Fenringer said on one of their monthly trips to the Carmichael church a two days walk from their valley.

  “Okay.” Moses thought standing in the back of the stone Church with the rest of his brothers while the women and young children sat on the long wooden benches in front of them. “How? That’s a purpose, now what does it look like? Is it going away, or setting up a homestead?” But the homily shifted in other directions as the priest chose to talk about showing love and mercy to one’s neighbors. A talk clearly intended for someone in the audience, though Moses didn’t think it was meant for him. Their closest neighbors took several hours of walking mostly uphill, to reach.

  “Love and mercy are wonderful.” He thought as he trudged through the rain after his father on the long road back home. He could vaguely hear his father’s muttered prayers from ahead,a string of rosary beads swaying from one hand, their sporing nets over their back as habit and ecology demanded while the last of the winter rain splattered off of their huge woven hats. “But it’s not something worth dying for, and what’s not worth dying for isn’t worth living for.”

  The thought came like lightning as his boots squelched through the mud. “What’s worth living for, is worth dying for!” Would he die for his family’s homestead? A stony hogan among the mountains in a patch of woods with the right number of Cato mounds sprouting among the trees?

  On weeks they didn’t make the two day trip to Carmichael for the sacraments, the routine around the homestead was as regular as the setting of the stars. In the morning they rose before the sun crested the valley’s hills, summoned from sleep, or chased from it, by the smell of persaga tea which mingled with the hogan’s smell of loam and the smoke which issued from overheated vents on the family’s oven. The hogan was a small affair, little more than a huge dirt pile excavated and then sealed up with stone, the hollow roofed over with a network of sibsig trunks and covered with tarps woven from the trees’ fronds, the whole building floored in packed dirt and just tall enough that you didn’t hit your head on the ceiling when you stood.

  The center of the hogan was occupied by their mother’s stove and each morning she banged around at it, crouched beneath the pots, pans and cooking implements, bundles of herbs, and bowls of uncooked or curing food she kept hanging from the ceiling just over her head. A whine issued from the corner where their father squatted as he ate his quick breakfast and listened to the news on the family’s holographic cube. It was a multipurpose machine which could also call the Carmichael emergency service or any of the nearby homesteads they happened to have the ID for. The boys stumbled from the blanketed off extension they’d added to the hogan a few years earlier and ran to the outhouse or snuck tastes of what Mom was making on the stove. Sometimes they watched the cube with their father while they drank tea made from a vine that grew wild on the rocky slopes to the west and which Mom would make a weekly pilgrimage to collect, sometimes getting enough to trade at the outpost for a little carving knife or a little salt. It boasted enough caffeine to get slow blood moving in the morning and was rumored to be a favorite even among the wealthy of the planet.

  After breakfast there were chores. Chickens to be hobbled in new spots where they wouldn’t destroy the jungle, old pecking circles to spore and cover with fresh layers of moss before the loam could dry, mom’s vegetable and herb garden to fertilize with the colony culturing dirt they traded at the outpost, and a latrine that needed measuring and spraying with more bacteria. All of it had to be done before the porqine were released from their pens to start their random circuit of the surrounding jungle while the boys began their shepherding patrols between and around the Cato mounds their chitinous flock depended upon for food. A few always went back to the house to help Mom around the stove or at the loom weaving the mats of sibsig fronds they used for everything from clothing and home insulation, to baskets they hung from the ceiling, and blanket sized shingles they spread over the curved double roof of the hogan where old mats had begun to wear thin or ragged from the winter rain and wind storms.

  It was a routine that Moses had hated once. He’d hated it on a physical level that made his veins and scalp itch. He hated the monotony of the tasks, and he hated when the monotony was interrupted. He hated the underhanded scuffling and arguments the boys got into over chores they considered easier or more tasteful than the rest, and the way every day ended with only the promise of another day much the same. Cardino was the one who showed him how stupid it was. Cardino was the one who’d done a lot for Moses. “You just have to do the hardest thing you can, and the rest of it all comes easier.” He’d told him when they were both assigned to digging a new Latrine. “You get it done and you move onto the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. It doesn’t change no matter where you go. Sometimes you do something knew so you think it’s exciting, but it’s all the same. It’s all always like this, always difficult, so you do the hard thing, and you just keep going.” and Moses had, and it had been easier as he said. Easier to ignore how little a difference it all seemed to make, so long as it was hard. So long as he was busy.

  Lunch came when their mother rang the bell, and dinner when the sun set, putting an end to any conceivable work that could be done improving their homestead. The boys on patrol chased the porqine back into their pens and tethered the chickens around the edge to give warning if any catoblepas saw the pen as an opportunity for feasting. After the evening meal there was usually time to watch some of the Church broadcast or a bit more of the news before collapse into the bed all four boys shared in behind the partition of the hogan.

  In his nineteen years Moses could only remember three Catos ever trying to get into the porqine pens.The predators were smaller than the porqine, though otherwise fairly similar. Both were covered in a chitinous carapace, both had six long legs with too many hinges and small beady eyes. The Catoblepas only rose to the boys knees while the porqine could get as tall as their hips, and where the porqine had large mandibles for chewing on the Cato fungi, the Catoblepas, presumably named for the fungi they haunted, had two long front legs which were crooked and covered in teeth sharp and hard enough that their mother used the larger ones as needles and the boys used the smaller ones for fish hooks. His father kept the carapace from one of the larger catos he’d killed trying a break into the pens nailed to the wall across from the front door of the hogan, it’s legs splayed around it on their own pegs. “He tasted better than the rest.” He told them when they asked why. That one had killed three of the porqine.

  “Why did you come?” Moses asked his mother the morning after they returned from the Carmichael. Their father was always sore after the hard climb back up from the valley floor and took a little longer to get out of the hogan in the morning. Somehow Moses found himself crouched on the hard packed dirt packed floor in front of the stove helping their mother with breakfast by standing over the porqine paste frying on it and stirring to disperse the oil into catch basins along the griddle while his mother mixed up the oatmeal the meat would be going into.

  “What do you mean?” She asked.

  His mother was a dark woman, like his father, both of them tanned by a genetic lottery that held three generations of settlers born on Marain. Any knowledge of their ancestry was buried to time and speculation as they worked to turn their present into their futur
e. He knew very little of their family’s history. He knew that his great ancestors were purchased with the rest of the settlers from the evacuation fleet around the old homeworld. That his parents had lived in Quinn City along the Mighty River at the base of the valley who’s Eastern edge they now made their home. He knew his father was afraid of the memory loss that eventually claimed his father’s life in the city and that his mother had sisters there, but little more.

  “You weren’t born here.” Moses said to his mother. “Why’d you come?” He waved around the hogan. “Even Carmichael has nicer homes than these. I can’t imagine Quinn city had anything less than they have there.”

  “Oh it’s much nicer sure.” His mother said as she stirred. “You had running water, hot running water, and showers instead of rivers. I don’t care how long you live in the bush, a body never gets used to bathing under the open sky when you growed up doin so in private.” She stirred and the two were quite for ten minutes or so until she stopped and took the griddle from Moses to pour the meat into the oatmeal. She pulled a jar off the string it hung from the rafters by and poured the oil in then set it back on its hook to swing in the half light of the holo cube.

  “Why?” Moses asked when she’d set the griddle back on the stove’s block.

  She waved a hand at him. “What sort of question is that? Why? Why do women do anything? For love of course, and for your father, and for you. It’s not as though I’d do it for fun is it?” She looked at her husband, sitting in front of the cube disconnected from reality as he cupped his persaga tea beside Gerard and Ephesus, two of Moses’ younger brothers.

  “The city isn’t anything to talk about Moses.” His mother said. “I know your father asked you where you want to go now you’re getting older, and you never seen a place except for Carmichael, so I’ll tell you about the big city. Most everyone there lives in shacks, not much better’n these here hogans we built ourselves, and much less sturdy, even if they do have running water from the river. Everyone doesn’t work for the big corporation lives in em, at least those doesn’t sponge off those that do through some business or another. We didn’t have nothin in Quinn. Not more’n we have here. Here it’s not the up and ups we depend upon but the up an ups that depend on us. Them lease lords let us out this valley, but without us this valley would be no more’n a patch of jungle and wild Catos. Sure they take care of us some ways, it’s how we got this stove and the cube in case there’s some kinda trouble, but your father saw a real chance to build us a life out here, to build you a life, and we was right to come here. Made a place where you boys got a real chance at building a future for yourselves that isn’t defined by someone else.”