The Star Mother

by J D Huffman

  “A dead one,” Demeter said, answering Sasha’s previous question as he stepped up next to her, observing his handiwork.

  She wanted to kill him. He was a good head taller than her, but she didn’t much care. She snagged him by the ratty edges of his collar, pulling him closer. “Damn you, Demeter! What is wrong with you? He wasn’t a threat!”

  He shoved her away, her hands quickly losing grip on his tunic. She didn’t go for him physically again, but she remained furious. Demeter, for his part, seemed nonchalant. “He would always have been a threat, Sasha. I know his type. I’ve seen it before. The psycho. The real, genuine killer. When it’s in a man’s blood, there’s no way to get it out. He’s like a mad dog. The only answer is to put it down.”

  Sasha didn’t understand his “dog” comment, but put it aside for the moment. She wasn’t ready to let his behavior go unchallenged. “I don’t care what you think you know, Demeter.” She stormed closer to him, putting her face close enough to his she could smell his breath, which stank as bad as everyone else’s in this place. “Am I your leader or not?”

  He nodded. “You are. William even ordered me to follow you and do what you tell me.”

  “Fuck William!” she spat. “If you’re going to follow me, it had better be because you want to, and it had better mean you’ll do what I expect of you, and not whatever you damn well feel like doing just because you think you know better!”

  He gave a deferential tilt of his head. “I apologize for acting without your blessing, Sasha. I don’t believe I made the wrong decision, however. He would have turned on us, eventually. He’d already turned on us. I believe you know that, deep down. You want to think everyone can be redeemed. I’ve seen it in how you conduct yourself. You value human lives, and that’s a good thing. But not everyone does. The Totality certainly don’t. And you’ll encounter humans who don’t, either. You have to be able to recognize them and treat them accordingly, or they will kill you.”

  She stepped away from him, going back toward the other man’s body—she realized she never even knew his name. She crouched next to his corpse and could smell the charred flesh. Demeter must’ve had his rifle on the highest setting. Almost burned all the way through him. With her eyes still on the corpse, she asked, “What would you have done with him on your world?”

  “On my world? A man who killed so many others like this one has, he’d be referred for execution. The High Circle of the Lexinian Authority would review his case and determine whether to take his life. And they almost certainly would. He’d be marched through the streets of the capital as his crimes are read for all to hear, and the procession would stop on the Bloody Grounds. He would take up his position on the Judgment Mound. Riflemen would make a semicircle facing him. The Grand Sage would read a passage from the Book of Old, perhaps something comforting about the virtues of mercy or, if he’s feeling fiery that day, a condemnation of evil and an exaltation of swift justice. The riflemen would fire their weapons and that would be the end of it. His body would remain for two days as a warning to anyone else who might engage in such heinous crimes, and then it’s turned over to the family, or put into a common grave if no one claims it. That’s how we do things on Lexin.”

  His Lexin sounded like a brutal place to her, full of ritual and devoid of compassion. It sounded less like justice and more like the worship of order. It led her to another question, as well. “And what about me, Demeter?”

  He cocked his head. “Hm?”

  She looked up at him. “If I did on Lexin what I did here—revolted against my ‘masters’—what would be the penalty?”

  “Well, for one thing, slavery is forbidden on Lexin.”

  “Forget that. What if I found the government oppressive, violent, and intolerable? What if I forcibly fought against it?”

  “Rebellion is a worse crime than murder,” he stated matter-of-factly. “To kill an individual is an immense deprivation of potential from the state. But to attempt to kill the state itself? It’s obscenity.”

  “You’re saying they would kill me, too.”

  “I’m saying they wouldn’t just kill you. They’d kill your family, everyone you ever knew, anyone who’d speak a good word of you. Your name would be purged from all records and only a number would exist in its place. A person who attempts to deny the state, the state will deny was a person.”

  Chapter 19

  The Darkness Without

  Sasha began to develop a sense that violence wasn’t so difficult to cope with as its consequences. She could pull the trigger on a rifle, watch an enemy’s face contort into an expression of death, hear the scream and see the blood and smell the charred flesh, step over the body as it hit the floor, move on as if she’d simply passed someone on a casual stroll. She didn’t savor it, not the way Demeter seemed to—and certainly not the way the dead man had, the one who’d ordered the slaughter of all those Totality and fellow humans. It was a fact, a necessity, a thing she did out of no desire for violence but as part of her broader vision. To free humanity of Totality oppression required violence. To destroy the enemies in their midst called for it, as well. She decided it was as simple as that.

  What she found harder to accept, however, was what came after. The docking bay was littered with bodies, both Totality and human. Angel and a few impromptu medics had managed to treat and stabilize some of the victims, but the vast majority didn’t survive. The large room reeked of death. It smelled just like the inside of that slave ship so many years ago. It was not a memory she preferred to relive. Her call for volunteers to help with cleanup brought down twenty people or so. A few quit shortly thereafter, unable to cope with the carnage. A couple vomited and cried, and she watched as Serim and Fred and Angel gently nudged them away from the scene. They needed people who could actually help, not those who were too squeamish to do any good. She knew there was no way they’d get off Actis if everyone had to traipse through this disaster. Word of it had already spread to everyone else, she was certain, but that wasn’t the same as seeing it. For that reason, she kept the doors that led into the rest of the facility sealed, only allowing volunteers who’d come to help pass through. The last thing she wanted were gawkers who’d stand around and stare and gossip about what must have happened. What would I tell them, anyway? I made a poor decision. I should have had that man and his companions locked up. I should have kept them under guard. I thought I could intimidate them into complying with my demands. I failed to recognize how far gone they were. That was my fault. These people, and these Totality, all died because of it.

  She, Fred, and Serim came up with a reliable system for disposing of the bodies. Having raided the mining facility’s linen supply, they found an abundance of fabric sheets they could use to wrap the corpses, then load them onto large hand-driven carts. Each cart could hold about fifteen bodies, which meant four or five trips would account for the lot. With four teams of three people working to do the wrapping—two to pick up the corpse at each end, and one to put the sheet underneath—their departure wasn’t too long delayed. By the end, Sasha noted it had only set them back a couple of hours. She thought about the perversity of that as she watched Fred and Serim thrust the corpses one by one into the incinerator. People stared as they wheeled the cart full of dead through the facility’s corridors. They stared, but did not ask. She avoided eye contact with them, not wishing to invite discussion in the first place. She only wanted to get the job done. She considered the lives of the dead, how they covered a variety of ages, young through old. Some were children who could have only just arrived on Actis a short time ago. Below a certain age, it seemed the Totality didn’t bother with abduction. She tried to recall if she saw any infants on the slave transport when she was a child, but she couldn’t remember. The question nagged at her. Do they leave babies out to die of exposure or be eaten by wild animals? Do they kill them and leave the bodies? She watched as another wrapped cadaver was thrus
t into the fire, its body small enough to indicate an adolescent. Their killers cared nothing for age nor innocence. She had a hard time imagining such an utter detachment from one’s humanity. In the Totality, she could grasp it. It was their nature. They didn’t identify with humans at all. But how could humans treat one another so terribly? Couldn’t they realize what binds us together? It occurred to her that many others could suffer a similar lack of solidarity, and she found the prospect deeply unsettling.

  It continued to perplex her as she organized the final loading and boarding of the first ship, with the relatively small number of survivors who’d opted to strike out on their own. She counted about fifty altogether, with several of them being the survivors of the atrocity that happened in the docking bay. She watched as Angel helped the last few onto the ship, some of them bandaged and hobbling, others carried by friends with Angel rattling off instructions for proper care. Sasha hoped the injured would be okay, though Angel’s expression after dealing with some of them left Sasha feeling less than optimistic. She took some comfort in the fact that they would have quite a roomy vessel to accommodate such a small number, while trying to ignore the likelihood that the number might grow smaller yet. The standard crew quarters would be rather cramped if people stuck solely to those, but if they converted the cargo bay, that offered a substantial amount of room. She offered that suggestion to one of the older men, one who seemed to be directing people. His name was Dale, and he gave her his own brief history, including his capture by the Totality as an adolescent. “I was in the middle of a class,” he related, “And they burst through our windows like a bomb had gone off. Our teachers tried to fight them. After the Totality killed a couple, everyone else submitted. I spent a number of years on a farming operation. Do you know where those fruits and vegetables in the kitchen come from? It’s from farms like the one I worked. Those are run by slaves, too.” That was a detail she might have preferred not to know. The thought that their food had been grown and harvested by other slaves chilled her, and after a brief reflection she realized that most anything they used was likely a product of human slave labor: their clothes, their food, any equipment they operated. Perhaps the only items not produced by slave hands were the rifles, though she could easily conceive of a system in which different factories output their own parts, which were useless individually but found their true purpose in a final assembly plant, either operated by slaves under strict supervision or entirely by Totality. She considered that the mining tools could be assembled the same way, but she wasn’t sure if she liked the idea of using Totality-built equipment any better. It’s not as if we have a choice.

  Her ideal would have been to establish a settlement on some isolated world, to build a city, to put up schools and hospitals and libraries and houses and grocery stores, to roll out farmland across the countryside, to lay down roads and build more settlements, to see people have children—lots of children—children without those forehead scars, children who would never know the name “Totality,” who would never have to grasp the horror of being crushed under the heels of beings that looked like them but held them in the utmost contempt. She pondered what it might be like for the Order, if those people feared the Totality in any way, or if they viewed the creatures as a vague, distant threat not worth much anxiety. She would have found such a state of mind miraculous, to be unable to experience that fear, much less have to process it.

  The bodies were destroyed, the bay was cleaned, and Dale had nearly finished loading people and supplies into the cargo ship. The bay looked much emptier now, even though there was still plenty of food and fuel to load onto the second ship. Sasha realized she was exaggerating the emptiness in her own mind, imagining the dead and the departing to be of far greater numbers than they were, as if to make herself feel more alone. But I am alone, aren’t I? Fred once told me that leadership is loneliness. I’m starting to understand.

  Everyone who remained with Sasha—about ninety people—came to the docking bay to send off the first ship. Someone started waving, which seemed an odd custom to Sasha, though she remembered William doing something similar when she went to see him earlier. She put up her hand and repeated the gesture, which soon brought everyone else into the display. The group of them waved their hands left and right as the ship drifted off, then lifted into the sky. She found the ritual strangely peaceful.

  Once the ship had flown out of sight and those in the docking area grew tired of waving, Fred went to the communications panel to summon the second ship. A volunteer crew had populated the ship since it was first captured, though Fred maintained a remote control failsafe device in case they attempted to flee the planet without everyone else. Fortunately, he’d not had need to use it. Sasha was glad for this as well, and somewhat heartened that she found herself able to rely on complete strangers without being betrayed. The notion became real to her once the second ship docked and opened its doors, revealing an almost empty cargo bay. She’d expected as much, since this was the ship that delivered mining supplies which were going to be useless once they departed Actis. When the crew exited down the ramp and greeted their familiars, Fred started ordering people to load cargo. That meant all the remaining fuel, food, medical supplies, and other equipment and materials from around the base that they might find to be of use. It had all been proportionally split with the other ship, but with their share kept in a compact area, all in one place, to Sasha it looked dreadfully spare. The food might be enough for a month or so. The ship’s water recycling should keep us hydrated. The fuel will carry us for quite a while, and the spare parts and repair supplies should help us if anything breaks, but our food situation isn’t going to hold up for long. Dale hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort, but given his farming background, she knew he had to be aware. I’m sure he just didn’t want to panic anyone. He seemed like a smart fellow. I hope he can find a nice planet with some fertile farmland. Maybe some crops already growing in the wild that they can harvest and eat. Someplace out of the way where the Totality won’t find them. She held onto that thought, in the event her uprising was ultimately crushed and everyone who followed her met an ignoble death. At least there would be those others out there, the ones who chose not to fight, but rather to flee and hide and make new lives somewhere else. She ignored the possibility that the Totality would happen upon the cargo ship and identify it as stolen, even with the fabricated identification codes that Fred had gone to some length to generate. “Only a highly trained technician would be able to detect them as forgeries,” he’d assured her, but what did he really know about it? She only had his word for these things. The more I depend on Fred’s expertise, the more I may be risking us all, as much as I don’t mean to. It did not escape her notice that the dilemma was much like the one they faced with regard to using slave-produced goods and equipment. Ultimately, it came down to a lack of options. Fred was the best she had, and she’d have been foolish not to use him, even if he turned out to be a fraud. And there are worse crimes than overselling your knowledge, aren’t there?

  Serim directed everyone who remained to board the ship, with Angel coordinating the transport of her patients. Sasha saw William, the older woman, and the little boy—I should really find out their names, she realized—and watched as their beds were wheeled up the ramp and into the cargo bay. A makeshift infirmary had been set up in a corner of the large chamber where the beds could be rigged to the floor so they wouldn’t slide about with every sporadic inertial shift.

  Fred left to go to the general operations center one last time to make sure the communications signal was set up properly. Sasha didn’t even want to think about all the Totality that had been killed—every last prisoner was dead, despite her intentions to keep them alive and leave them unharmed until they could be found by their own kind. She didn’t want to consider the consequences that might result when the Totality discovered what had happened. While the bodies had all been incinerated, she assumed their essences—or whatever they were ca
lled—would take on new bodies and report precisely had been done to them. There could be a fleet on its way here right now and we wouldn’t know. If we weren’t being forced to leave by the failing environmental system, we’d still have to escape because of all this. She hated not knowing what the Totality knew, if they even knew anything yet.

  Once Fred returned, she had the cargo ramp pulled up, sealing the ship, then strolled through the voluminous bay now stocked with provisions and supplies, moving past Angel’s setup. The thought hit her that someone was missing. Tau. I didn’t even remember to ask. She almost kept walking, to head for the command deck and order the ship to depart. She grabbed Fred by the arm, stopping him so he’d turn and face her. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Go on ahead and take us out,” she ordered quietly. “I’ll join you soon.”

  He looked puzzled but didn’t ask questions. She let go of his hand and watched him move away, stepping through the door that went up the narrow shaft to the ship’s command deck. Sasha turned and approached Angel, who was checking the intravenous fluids being pumped into the older woman. The woman made eye contact and Sasha gave an uncomfortable nod, not especially interested in making conversation with a stranger at that moment. She put her hand on Angel’s shoulder, which got the young woman’s attention. “Just give me a moment,” Angel urged.

  Sasha quietly stepped away, moving into the opposite corner. They would be buffered by canisters of fuel and not overheard, or so was Sasha’s intention. Angel finished her work and joined Sasha among the fuel containers. “What’s going on?”

  “Tell me about Tau,” Sasha pleaded.