by Alex Deva
And that, -- more than waking up in the future, more than learning English, more than finding out about aliens -- that changed his life forever.
He discovered that he was a natural pilot, and he discovered that flying was what he was born to do.
Giving up that crate had felt really wrong.
But discovering Effo, parked right under the airlock of their starship, felt incredibly good.
The three of them had ended up mingled in the Moon War, a space conflict between Americans and Eurasians over mines on the Moon. Both the Yanks and the so-called Queens had tried to win them on their side. The Yanks had used direct force; the Eurasians had been more devious. Aram felt sure that neither the unfortunate American cruiser commander Gaines, who had nearly killed Doina and nuked them all up (and whose bones Aram had endeavoured to methodically break for that reason), nor the scheming German colonel Tiessler whom they met later, were anybody on whose side Aram would've gladly fought in a war.
After all, the only thing they all wanted was Doi.
The amazing starship, which customised itself for its three-person human crew, with its near-lightspeed engines and versatile matter converter, was what they all yearned for.
Of course, the starship alone would've been useless. Only Doina, the young girl who kept talking about God (Christianity was another thing that had Aram perplexed), only she could tame the huge alien flying torus into doing anything she wanted. Even the ship's name, Doi, had been imparted from the young girl's name -- it had been what her mother used to call her. When Doina went into Room One, the starship's designated command-and-control centre, and connected with the ship, that was a sight to remember.
Not that he was easily amazed. He was a cool young man, who took everything in stride and made the best of everything. His people, the Dacians -- the ancestors of Doina's Vlachians, and the forefathers of the Romanians, now part of the Eurasian alliance -- had always believed that they were immortal. At some level, Aram was still pretty sure death was somehow inconsequential.
On the other hand, however, as the chief strategist of their little group, Mark was always trying to err on the side of caution.
Aram respected Mark. When he'd first seen the small, wiry Englishman, he knew he was looking at a soldier, even though Mark's manners were reserved and he spoke gently, like the scholar he'd said he was. That he was also a soldier, it turned out, had been a well-guarded secret. Mark had been in the British Special Forces. During a secret mission, he had been tortured and then forced to watch his friend being decapitated, somewhere in what they called the Middle East. He had promised to look after his friend's family, but failed. He was medically discharged from the military and, in an attempt to save him from himself and from vengeful jihadists, he was sent to Romania as an English teacher, and then swiftly kidnapped by Doi before he'd even set foot in a school.
The little girl whom he'd failed to protect had been about the same age as Doina.
Aram knew what that meant for Mark. The Brit was anything but a stupid brute of a soldier. He was extremely well trained, both physically and mentally, and he could think on his feet. He had an thorough, analytical mind and he knew how to work things out. Aram had lived his life mostly by jumping headlong into whatever came his way, but Mark was nothing like that.
Aram had seen Mark fight. They'd even fought each other; once or twice for real, and then for practice. He'd seen how he planned and judged his moves in fractions of a second, and how he made the most complicated fighting techniques seem effortless.
Now Mark was a man he was really, really glad to have on his side.
The three of them made up the whole crew of Starship Doi. It was hard at first, of course; even finding food had been a challenge. The alien starship was capable to create things, but explaining them was difficult. Of course, it was easier when Doina did it, as she mostly only had to think about the things she needed created. Her connection with the starship was intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Mark and Aram were reduced to tapping dark icons on the command panels, or speaking with the ADM, the ship's "automated decision maker", who, more often than not, seemed to have its own agenda.
Even the uniform he was wearing -- matte black, with a silver, handwritten "Doi" on the chest -- had been created out of the strange alien gel that the starship seemed to have in huge supply. And it fit much better than his old woollen pants.
In war, it's always important to have good clothes!
The Moon War. Aram had seen people killed in a million ways before. If it hadn’t been for the poor Romans who did their best to keep some order in the land, there would've been nothing but war in Dacia. He wondered what Naevius, the Roman centurion with whom he had chatted right before he'd been plucked by Doi, would've made out of the idea that people wage war in the skies.
He'd seen people die before. But not the way they died in space.
He would never forget the first dying people he saw.
Helpless puppets tumbling in space at speed, flailing arms and legs, doomed to any number of horrible deaths, some killed by Doi's automated defences in what later seemed like mercy.
Aram shuddered.
It was a horrible war. And, right in the middle of it, they had been given an ultimatum: choose a side, or face both.
Neither the Americans nor the Eurasians could afford the alien starship on the other side. They had been asked to choose, or else.
They were spared the choice, however, by the sudden arrival of Five -- an unbelievable being made of literally astronomically long strands of antimatter (Petrov had many times tried to explain to Aram what antimatter was, with moderate success), a single individual who could stretch itself in space over billions and billions of kilometres. A single individual of a race consisting of exactly eight. The Eight.
The Dacian Wars paled in comparison to the World Wars.
The World Wars paled in comparison to the Moon War.
And the Moon War paled in comparison to the Cold War between the Eight and the Builders.
The Builders were the aliens who created Starship Doi. They were masters at manipulating matter. Their enemies, The Eight, that incredible race of only eight conscious, intelligent and powerful antimatter beings, ruled over a Union of many alien races. They were undetectable even for the Builders technology, and they moved through space riding gravity waves, small molecular-sized antimatter bundles forming gigantic filaments.
They'd arrived and carelessly destroyed an Eurasian base, the Yǒngqì. They'd arrived and immediately demanded that Earth choose a side.
Speaking for the entire planet, the German Tiessler and the American Drake asked for some time to think about it.
Five agreed and vanished without another word. Nobody knew when it would return and what they'd tell it then. Aram had been tasked to fly Effo, the starship that was like his second body, in recon missions around the solar system, looking for odd gamma radiation patterns that might herald the presence of an improbably huge being made of antimatter on its way back to Earth, demanding an answer on which the fate of his whole planet would depend.
"It's the final countdown," yelled Joey Tempest.
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Starship Doi: Wars
by Alex Deva
Coming soon.