Exodus: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  He was shamed and shunned by silence at his father’s table when he enrolled in Toruń Teachers College, then settled for a bad job teaching Orion history in the local grade school. He finished Officer Training part time and took a commission in the Home Guard and Reserves. Every time he put on the uniform to do his weekly hours his father made an excuse not to be there to see him in it. Jan tailed him one night. As he suspected, the trail ended in a local pub.

  His father hardly spoke to him at all after he came home, about anything. They lived in the same house but inside two solitudes, with Jan’s mother alone in a third in the middle. He never spoke once to Jan, his only son, about his great failure. Not a word about walking away from Aral Academy. About ‘throwing away your military education over some fool girl.’

  Jan knows that’s what he thought, even though he never actually said it. When he first came home, his mood dark and his manner as dour and taciturn as his disappointed father, his mother asked about the girl he left behind on Aral, and why. He didn’t want to talk about it. Not ever. Anne-Marie Wysocki grieved silently for her son’s suffering, as all good mothers do.

  Now, as he lies waiting for liftoff on KRN Asimov with nothing more to do for his new brigade, he thinks: ‘Mother is trapped behind Rikugun lines.’ All alone in his silent boyhood home in a rural hamlet overrun by RIK in the first days of the war. ‘Or maybe she’s dead.’

  He isn’t sure and has no way to find out. He’s had no news from home in half a year. He wants to see her, embrace her, kiss her ageing peach-fuzz cheek a farewell time. Warn her in the words of the Buddha, in which he never believed but she does: “Mother, you must get out of your own burning house.” It’s too late. All the forests and fields of Genève are on fire.

  He craves at this moment of leaving to tell his worried, mournful mother about the girl on Aral who broke his hopes and heart, the first and only great love of his youth. How when he lost her over a quarrel so slight he can’t recall its outline now, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think or study or play mercury ball for the Academy again. Couldn’t feel anything, for anyone.

  He’d tell her about another girl, the first to catch his breath and stop it in his throat since that distant time of deep loss of love and himself on Aral. Tell her that Zofia is strapped to a bunk on Resolute, about to hurtle skyward like him. Only separate from him, because of him.

  ‘Will I lose her, too? Have I lost her already? Love is too dangerous a thing for me. I don’t deserve it, anyway.’ Even he’s starting to find this self-loathing tiresome. But next comes his first real admission of regret, replacing self-pity. ‘Look how I hurt Zofia, for no reason.’

  Jan is strapped onto a hard pine bunk, one of the temporary wooden berths bolted deck-to-ceiling in every hallway and storage room, each lazaret and cofferdam, even in bits of the two Engine Rooms of a grossly overcrowded frigate. He has pine board to himself, a privilege given to senior officers at brigade or division rank of colonel and above. Well, sorta to himself.

  Most senior officers won’t share their bunks, claiming they must store vital equipment there or just standing on privilege and an unstated claim that their rest time is more valuable than any other’s. Not the commander of Wysocki’s Wreckers.

  Beside him in space afforded only to rank lies the stray husky pup he rescued from the streets of Toruń nine days ago, right after his break-up with Zofia. Her head is tight against his thigh, adoring steel-gray-on-silver eyes watching his twitching face. A wool blanket cushions her chin from the hard pine. He calls her Samara and scratches her into deep contentment, concentrating behind one pointed ear. Calming her before the coming lift-off and G-force.

  He’s exhausted, feeling overstretched. With eight days to recruit a new brigade he chose not to sleep. Against medical advice but accepting Dylan Byers’ he ingested a heavy dose of Q-moda, a sniper’s extreme stimulant even more powerful than the usual type. He had experience as a cadet, since dilute moda was used by many students prepping for a big match or for final exams at the Academy. This time he forewent the normal course of protein and sugar build-up that all snipers make in advance, before he slipped the tiny med flake up his nostril. So he got real close to the outer limits of safety a lot faster than back in college or in basic training.

  He knows that after a week of no sleep, and worse, of hyper alertness, he’s about to crash real hard. So will every other exhausted officer in the brigade.

  ‘Well, so what? I’m likely to die this hour anyway. If not, I can do the moda jitters right here on this fine pine bunk.’

  He’s already deep into wander as the ignition roar of the plasma drive shudders the ship. His interior questioning becomes dense and off the mark, febrile and chaotic, denying him any calm or felt security. His eyes close, still restless. His tongue hangs out farther than Samara’s.

  She looks at him quizzically. He’s acting oddly, talking to himself and grinning wide. Though not like the cruel boys who chased her in Lakeside Park and threw rocks at her, until she turned and nipped one real good in the leg and he ran away bleeding and crying.

  That’s when Jan saw her, wet and skinny and alone, orphaned when the war and RIK came to her farm and slaughtered everything living. Somehow she got away, survived alone on one of the ash roads, starving but never stopping until she made the 700 klic journey to Toruń.

  He laughed. Called her to where he was sitting under a fig tree, thinking about how he had just made the mistake of his life with Zofia. He gave her food and a focus for loyalty and devotion. She’s already his best guard. She’s also the quiet soul he speaks with late at night.

  A wool blanket is folded under his neck, keeping the bench from hurting his head as he’s pressed down hard by far more Gs than is normal or seems healthy as the frigate lifts-off under additional and ancient boost energy. There’s no padding at all under his elbows, back or buttocks. They all hurt like hell where they press against hard pine. Samara gives a whimper as she’s pressed down hard as well. She doesn’t try to move from Jan’s side as her high bushy tail grows too heavy to wag. She curls it under her hindquarters, where it’ll be safe.

  Jan’s too tall for the bunk. His knees are drawn up and bang into another pallet just far enough above to allow a man or woman to slide in between, but not to roll over. There are six more bunks above that one and three below him. And ten more barely an arm’s length away on the opposing wall of this tiny, converted ship’s lazaret.

  On every wide bunk two Wreckers lie, head-to-foot, every one looking as miserable and accusatory as an old family dog carelessly left outside in a thunderstorm. Just like patient, loyal, war-orphaned Samara looked over many long nights alone before Jan befriended her.

  The air in the lazaret is stifling, with a strange odor he can’t quite place. That’s because 1,500 Wreckers are crammed on board, most for six hours or more. Captain Lev Tiva assured him before liftoff that life support on the tight frigate is good enough to sustain the extra load.

  Then he saluted Jan in mock-KRA fashion, with palm turned outwards rather than down as in the KRN. His thickly-browed eyes twinkled as always, and he grinned from under a white peaked cap sporting a soft yellow band and double-headed falcon signifying ‘Fleet Officer.’

  “But it’s going to smell like five cats died in the locker room, all the showers are dank and broken, the whole mercury ball team is standing around you sweating right after the game, and your old coach just took a huge dump in the back.”

  Lev Tiva has a deserved reputation for near-constant levity and schoolboy jokesterism. His brown eyes danced with a naughty child’s delight to see Jan’s disgust at a vulgar imagery. Now he shows another side, a bent for literary reference fitted to the moment that surprises Jan. He simply hurls it into the air, even as he swinges off to Asimov’s Bridge.

  “Consider the sea. Its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent and treacherously hidden beneath its lovely azure. Think on the devilish brilliance of its most remorseless sharks, and its
universal cannibalism, where all creatures carry on eternal war.”

  Then he bellows an odd farewell, and salutes: “I’m off to hunt a great White Whale.”

  Jan knows this one. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

  He think’s Tiva is half-mad.

  Samara is more or less of the same opinion. She especially doesn’t like his too-yellow hat. She’s planning to chew it up, first chance she gets.

  “Though he’s a real good butt scratcher.”

  ‘Was that me or Samara?’

  “He did me a real good scritch this morning.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Said what, colonel?”

  “Nothing. Never mind, son.”

  ‘Damn these jitters! I’m confused as hell.’

  Jan can’t get the raunchy image out of his head because it comes uncomfortably close to accurately describing the odor playing about his nostrils. He wonders: ‘Did Tiva ever stand on a pitch like I used to, trying to catch an unpredictable ball loop-and-drop and hover and change direction as its liquid interior tumbles randomly? Did he shower in an Academy locker room? Where did he come up with that vulgarity? And most important, how did he know?’

  Toruń’s white plasma and laser and maser batteries are shooting hard and fast, carving an angled, narrow flight tunnel for Alpha through a close-orbit of waiting enemy warships. The shooting is causing a lot of extra turbulence as plasma tears upward through the atmosphere. It also signals Alpha’s departure to the RIK tactical sky force and Kaigun ships above. That can’t be helped. It’s critical to speed to optimal altitude before engaging the Type-3 fusion drives.

  What Colonel Jan Wysocki doesn’t know, what Captain Magda Aklyan doesn’t know, what only General Constance knows is the terrible price paid by one man to ensure that Alpha is streaking through the upper clouds before RIK HQ can react, because it’s leaving a day early. A man whose about to die tormented and abused in a dark prison cell. Utterly alone, his death and suffering will not be noted in the history books. He’ll die always and forever anonymous.

  Nine ships strain upward, racing to break right past orbit to achieve escape velocity and swing around the high Kaigun patrol. They’re already 50 klics up and accelerating with each microsecond. Each one launched from ground moorings in Toruń Shipyard within a 60-second window, an absurdly dangerous timing pattern. Wake turbulence from the troopships, flying in tandem in the lead-off position, means Asimov is driving far harder than is good for its engines.

  All fusion drives eject white-hot plasma beyond even flank speed lift-off demands, well past prewar environment and urban safety protocols. All chemical and smaller sub-boosters in the flotilla are also shooting white. Every captain and officer on each of nine Bridges is pushed harder and deeper into a flight chair than he or she ever experienced before. Everywhere within the flotilla wooden bunks hard-bolted or reeved to stiff metal or carbon-fiber walls groan and shudder, vibrate and creak unnervingly. So too all the jostling, jammed-in, frightened fighters.

  Jan grips the sticky sides of his pine bunk as Asimov pulls fresh loads of gravity down onto itself and him, absurdly contending for escape velocity against the physics of an entire planet. He always thought lift-off was quite an unnatural thing to assay. He much prefers the smooth calm of a space elevator ride to a hard launch like this, the kind of rush only old tars boast about when well in their cups. ‘It’s why I joined the Army, not the fucking Navy.’

  “It’s just not natural,” he gripes to simpering Samara. She’s thinking exactly the same. She looks at Jan with up-rolled, steel-gray-on-silver eyes. The G-force is making it too hard to raise her head or howl, as she wants to do.

  The wood bench beneath him feels sticky and smells of pine tar. The one above, with two young Wreckers pressed white-knuckled into it, is slow-dripping something into his hair.

  ‘What IS that?’

  He wants to reach up a finger to test it, but he can’t raise his arm.

  ‘Sap! Damn, it’s all over me. Samara, too.’

  ‘Funny how you get used to comfort. To a soft bed and clothes. What did a little sap mean in Pilsudski Wood or in the ash lands? Nothing!’

  He laughs bitterly and out loud, relieving his stress but startling the boys above and 36 others in the tiny alcove, two per bunk. Except for Jan’s. All are nervously gripping the bunk boards or each other. Some are trying not to lose the contents of their stomachs, or their bowels.

  He worries about the effect of his laughter.

  ‘It’ll just add to my stupid, fucking legend. If we live through this, tomorrow they’ll all say that I laughed in the face of danger. Or some other shit like that.’

  He’s not wrong.

  The idea of it, of his being a living legend and a Ulysses to his people, is so stupid it makes him laugh out loud a second time. This time Samara tries to bark in response, throatily and half-formed, through curled-back, black leathery lips she manages: “Arrrrooooohhh!”

  ‘What’s up with you, master Jan? When will this strange, awful weight lift off my head and back? When can I wag my tail again? What have you gotten us into? Can I get off now?’

  Samara’s nervous, drawn-out barking makes everyone relax a bit. Any who can see the flattened and panting husky pup from their own slabs grin widely or laugh weakly back.

  ‘Will it be this way forever? Must I play the hero when I know I’m not? I’ll just have to live with both realities. After all, for centuries people thought light is both wave and particle and that we’d never be able to say when and where at the same time. If physics functioned for so long with such mad truths, maybe I can survive a while as both a hero and a fraud.’

  He realizes he’s giddy with stress and adrenalin and withdrawal. The jitters are kicking in hard since he’s no longer trying to fight them off. He needs to calm down. He breathes deep and slow like they taught him, marshaling his thoughts, going over the coming mission. It’s the first chance he’s had in days for private thoughts, to roll over in his mind his break with Zofia, his unexpected promotion, his ‘legend’ and the Ulysses order from mad General Constance.

  It doesn’t work. He can’t concentrate on the brigade.

  ‘Helvetti, there’s nothing more I can do anyway, not about anything. Wreckers’ lives are all in Captain Magda Aklyan’s hands now, not in mine.’

  His thoughts flee to find Zofia.

  ‘The curve of her neck and her supple breasts, that little mole above the indentation at the small of her lower back where I stroked her. Her legs tightly wrapped-around my waist, her taut buttocks, her sweet russet diadem, so warm and wet...”

  Erotic self-distraction doesn’t work, either. His moda pullback is much too powerful, scattering and shattering his thoughts, jagging them back-and-forth beyond his control.

  As thrusters push him harder against the rigid bunk his mind turns away from making love with Zofia to making bloody mayhem in the woods with her at his side. Lifts him out of Zofia’s wet and thrusting loins to drop him into battle, to his talent for bringing pain and death. Catapults him into cruelty, calculation and destruction. It’s all he knows anymore.

  ‘Gods, see the bloody blade in her hand?’

  ‘That boy’s got two smiles now. Ha!’

  ‘Will this new brigade survive through the next hour, past the Kaigun patrol?’

  ‘Will we make it to the end of today, to the L2?’

  ‘Where’s Alpha going next?’

  “Need to know only, colonel.”

  He could swear he hears General Constance’s voice, somewhere in the room. He looks suspiciously at Samara, pressed flat and miserable against the bunk.

  “What did you say?”

  Her eyes are closed to narrowed slits hidden by silver fur, black leathery lips are oddly pressed down by gravity, showing half her lower canines, over which a foam of white drool is leaking. She’s moaning a little under the extra weight. Her t
ail is unmoving. She can’t move it.

  “I said you don’t need to know which rabbit hole.”

  ‘I don’t need to know because I don’t know already. Makes perfect sense.’

  ‘You can’t be trusted with information like that. You might run away, to the enemy.”

  ‘Damn! Will I never live that down? You said I am to be Ulysses!’

  “It’s not the title that honors you colonel, but you who must sail on Ionian seas.”

  ‘What?’

  “Off with his head!”

  ‘Whose head? Mine?’

  “You heard me.”