by Joshua Guess
Experience readied my brain to accept the strange glances and furtive stares which always came with my interactions with the general population.
Except it didn’t happen.
Instead there was barely a ripple in the press of people laughing, talking, and hawking goods. It took me a few seconds to remember that aside from being ragged and covered in bandages, the only thing differentiating me from the crowd was my borrowed Defense Force uniform. Williams wore one as well, and aside from a couple smiles and appreciative nods drew almost no attention.
“Fresh grilled steak! Burgers! Corn on the cob!”
The call rang out loud from just a few stalls away, but it felt like the speaker jammed his mouth against my head. In response to the vendor’s shout, my nose automatically began searching for those particular smells.
“Holy shit that smells good,” I said.
Williams absently rubbed a hand across his belly. “Been a long day, and those rations are awful. You hungry? Because I could eat.”
I opened my mouth to decline, but my stomach rumbled. “Yeah, but I don’t have any money.”
In point of fact I didn’t even know what they used for money here and only had a vague, historical sort of idea of its use at all. The basics, the mechanics of it, I understood. It was the practiced comfort of using it I lacked. I’d watched people in Bravo 2, but was more interested in the people themselves than I was in transactions.
“No worries, man,” Williams said. “You saved our lives today. I figure I at least owe you a decent meal.”
***
The trip back home was uneventful, though not boring.
Williams, amused by my wide-eyed gape at the variety of food available from a single shop, decided to treat me to a sampling of the menu. The food was wrapped in sheets of the same gray stuff many things out here seemed to be made of—it was the same nanomaterial the Sand was composed of—and among its many qualities, insulation from heat loss made it a prime choice for to-go orders.
Shelby’s bright and colorful lights and signs were behind us, the winding market where we bought our dinner a pleasant memory. I wanted more than anything to go back and sit off to one side just so I could gawk at it all for a while longer. When I mumbled something to that effect out loud, Williams slapped me on the back.
“You just want to look at the girls, yeah?”
I shook my head with a smile. Williams had pointed out several gorgeous women and men chatting on one of the higher levels, explaining that if I found myself back this way in the future I should make it a point to visit the establishment behind them. It was a brothel called Donna’s.
There was never a point in my life where I imagined myself sitting on an underground pod moving several hundred kilometers an hour, eating a piece of steak and thinking about prostitutes. Life has a funny way of making you look at whatever situation you’re in and forcing you to realize that, out of context, any moment of our lives can be seen as utterly ridiculous.
“How do you like that?” Williams asked, nodding to the charred hunk of cow I was working on.
I chewed thoughtfully for a moment, watching the dim tunnel walls zoom by. “It’s not bad. I’m used to vat-grown stuff, and that’s never cooked over an open flame. I think I could grow to like it, but I’m having a hard time getting used to the taste and texture.”
Williams nodded sagely. “I get that. All our rations are vat-grown food. I never did get used to that. Also, these are pretty awful cuts of meat. Try the corn, I think you’ll like it much more. They seal up the ear in foil with real butter. It caramelizes just right…”
I didn’t have to be told twice. The outer wrapping fell away with a touch, and I peeled the thin aluminum foil back to take in the rich, flavorful aroma. The first bite was wonderful in the way food can only be to the starving man. No matter how far we come as a species, no matter the technological advances, the primal joy of devouring something delicious will always transcend rational thought.
We ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes, and I began to feel off, somehow. At first I thought it was the food, alien to my digestive tract, disagreeing with me. Then I realized the problem wasn’t physical. It was as if someone slipped a filmy shade over the lights of my mind. A sense of unease began to build, edged with streaks of anger, sadness, and fear.
I tried to ignore it, but the advance was inexorable if gradual.
“What’s going on?” I grunted. Williams looked up from his meal, confused.
I am sorry, Jax sent. What you are experiencing is the backlash from me resetting the controls on your brain chemistry.
“What the fuck?” I growled. “What does that mean? Williams has a speaker, talk through it so he stops looking at me like I’m out of my mind.”
“Apologies,” Jax said. “My deeper commands activate when you are in combat. I have been monitoring and controlling certain elements of your neurochemistry and synapses since we engaged with the enemy. Doing so meant forcing some neurotransmitters and emotional responses into the background until you were safe enough to process the reactions. The rebound effect may intensify these feelings for a short while.”
There was a pause, during which I glanced at Williams. The big man looked horrified beyond words at the thought of having some other being in charge of something as personal as basic emotional response. I knew the feeling, no pun intended, because until that moment I had no idea Jax was even capable of such a thing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I croaked.
“I could not,” Jax said through the speaker, his artificial voice regretful. “My core commands force me to keep certain things from you until necessary. Your response to my releasing control indicated incipient panic, requiring me to tell you what was happening.”
To anyone else this probably sounded like the smooth, emotionless droning you’d expect from a machine, but what I heard had more distinctions in it. Jax was designed to make judgment calls, and because of that any precondition—such as keeping information from me—would have the kind of exceptions he mentioned, but ultimately he had final say on what circumstances qualified for sharing information.
As a Blue, I know better than anyone how the minds back on Ceres think. They knew they couldn’t hobble the computer in my brain very tightly, but they would have intended to keep this sort of information from me if at all possible.
Jax could have easily said nothing. I’ve had full-blown panic attacks before. Dealing with the sort of stress I do means pushing endurance and experience into new territory. Sometimes the only possible coping mechanism is a full-on mental restart.
He hadn’t let that happen. I knew, just fucking knew somehow, that Jax was angry at being forced to do this to me. So he’d used the first excuse his programming would allow to explain it.
I took a deep, calming breath.
“Do whatever you need to,” I said, voice shaky. “I don’t know why they thought this was necessary, but I just want to get through it.”
I pointedly ignored the concerned look on Williams’s face and mentally ordered Jax to switch back to text mode. As I read, the situation made more sense, the reasoning of Jax’s programmers more clear. I didn’t like it, but I could at least understand.
During the fight, Jax tagged a bunch of specific memories as they formed. Now, in the calm of the maglev tube, he triggered those memories one at a time. In human history, war has always acted as a microcosm of human frailties. Every weak point in our mental armor is amplified by the extreme circumstances. To avoid the potentially catastrophic problems that come with war, the designers of my NIC chose to create a fail-safe system within Jax to keep me fighting without distraction.
One after another, I relived the memories of every Gaethe I had killed and felt the horror Jax had suppressed for the first time.
Twenty-Two
“How is it you can be in contact with other space-faring civilizations and know so little of my people?” Shuul asked from the sidelines as I worked out some
aggression on a punching bag.
I was practicing punching and kicking without Jax’s aid. I needed to train my body to function, to balance and strike true, without help. This wasn’t a philosophical issue, but practical. Jax could only be my crutch in a fight if he was working, and I’d lost use of him before.
“I’ve been wondering that myself, actually,” I said. “We’ve been given information about you by other species, but there was a lot of bias in it, obviously. You’re painted as conquerors at best, a virulent pest species at worst.”
Shuul, like all Gaethe, had less mobility in his neck than humans. Even so, the faint tilt of his head was recognizably a gesture of thoughtfulness. “Not far from the mark.”
I paused in my assault upon the heavy bag. “I didn’t expect you to agree.”
Shuul smiled, revealing rows of narrow, pointed teeth. “We invaded your world, Mars. And it wasn’t the first.” He paused, the tiny black dots of his pupils darting around in his otherwise solid blue eyes. “I won’t argue we are conquerors, but do you know why?”
I began my routine again. “Sure. Your planet is thousands of huge lakes with strips of land between them. Somewhere along the way you evolved enough to leave the water, at which point your species began to diverge into racial groups as you fought for new territory.”
“A succinct explanation,” Shuul said. “The problem for everyone who is not Gaethe, of course, is that like the need to breed, our need to expand and control is built into us. With some it is absent, as there are always some exceptions, and in others like me the urge is small and easily controlled.”
I finished a long combination of punches and moved into kicks. “What I don’t understand is why you’re willing to help us.”
Shuul had no eyebrows to raise, but I’d built a small visual vocabulary of Gaethe expressions in the two days I’d been back at Bravo 2. His jaw jutted forward slightly, which rocked his head backward a few degrees. It was surprise.
“I want to help because I am not in favor of genocide,” Shuul explained. “My people aren’t monsters. You’ll note that we warned you before we attacked. There are growing factions arguing for…extreme solutions to our genetic need for conquest. If you were to measure the growth of our coastal cities, you would notice an increase over the last few decades. All over this world, humans recede further toward the continental interiors each year as our cities expand.”
One of the first revelations Shuul had given me was the basic nature of Gaethe technology, which was that most of it was organic. The cities ringing the edge of every land mass were alive, in a sense. Networks of tubes with the same kind of capillary abilities as tree roots fed them, drawing resources from the oceans and even the land to speed growth.
“I know, I know,” I said, switching from kicks to elbow and knee strikes. “We’re at the cusp of runaway growth. The draas” I said, attempting to pronounce the Gaethe word for the white material comprising their dwellings and ships, “will reach a critical mass of growth potential in the near future.”
“Your pronunciation is terrible,” Shuul said. “But as you lack a second layer of vocal chords, I forgive. It’s not just the growth of the draas, however. In fact, that will still happen so slowly as to make little difference. It is what my people will do once that milestone has been observed.”
Which was the basis for the plan of attack the Defense Forces had begun long before my arrival. One the draas reached a certain density, it would be seen as the starting point of the second phase of Gaethe domination of Earth. Thousands of ships would be put into service, as would millions of Gaethe warriors. Powering it all would require an enormous surge in exotic matter production. Hence the plan to attack the warseed in Jacksonville.
It was a lot to keep in my head, and no small part of why I was trying to wear myself out on the heavy bag. There were a lot of variables in the situation. A ton of moving parts, but prolonging the survival of humanity on Earth and dealing a potentially fatal blow to Gaethe society here hinged on a single target. My decades of absorbing pop culture did nothing to tint my glasses in rose; the Gaethe knew the Jacksonville warseed was the largest vulnerability to their next step in dominating the planet.
They would act accordingly. Had done so already, if Shuul was to be believed. The level of protection dedicated to the warseed would be almost unimaginable. Subtle, of course, but on a scale capable of repelling almost any assault we could dream up.
“I find it very sad that the most you know of us is what you need to wage war,” Shuul said. I turned to face him, something defensive brewing on the tip of my tongue, but he raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “My words are clumsy. Forgive. It would be impossible for you to know our history, our struggles.”
He waved a hand at himself. “You have seen the warrior class. Most of them have a coloration not unlike your sharks, ranging from solid gray to combinations of gray and white. To you, it is easy to associate them with those animals. Hungry, carnivorous.”
I might have mentioned at that point my total dissociation from Earth, including more than an educational familiarity with ocean life, but I passed. I got his point.
Shuul continued. “My skin is light brown, with pale stripes. I wish I had the time to teach you about us. Those warriors are of the algath, our progenitor race. They were the first Gaethe. The ocean they came from is a brutal place where the predators are swift and clever.”
I walked over to the bench and grabbed a towel, wiping sweat from my face. “I get it, Shuul. I do. Your people have been shaped by a harsher evolutionary process than we have.”
Shuul worked his jaw, the Gaethe equivalent of a shake of the head. “No, you misunderstand. The algath sanctify many of their fighters with blood. They must swim the oceans and survive if they can. Some are forced to do so by their families when they are little more than children.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. Shuul nodded.
“Yes. Among the algath it is a dying tradition. Slowly, but dying all the same. My race is called haalgah in our common language. It roughly means ‘people of the mud’ in yours.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that a reference to being of a lower caste or…?”
Shuul smiled. “Quite literal, I assure you. Over millions of years our ocean shrank, leaving great mud flats. Our color adapted, as did our need to move beyond the water. We were the first to live on land permanently. The first tool users. But that is old, old lore. Something like you explaining to me how your ancestors climbed out of the trees.”
Shuul’s eyes grew distant. “The wars and politics of my people are irrelevant. What matters most is that you know I do not betray their trust easily. I don’t want more war, more death. For our many flaws, the Gaethe are a people who love their children, who laugh and create art. We are as vibrant a species as any. Our damnable genetics are the problem, especially given how strong the drive to conquer becomes when we are threatened.”
I couldn’t help laughing at that. “Humanity doesn’t pose much of a threat to your species, Shuul. You control at least a dozen worlds.”
Shuul turned his body to face me, surprised. “Surely you know how pressed we are on those worlds.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “We’re the only ones fighting you, aren’t we?”
Shuul threw his head back and made a trilling noise I took for either laughter or rage. It really could have gone either way. When he regained control of himself, Shuul rested his head in his hands in an all-too-human display. “How can you not know? Do your allies lie to you so outrageously?”
“It’s not like I get told a lot,” I said. “Up there I’m just a pilot. But the general understanding in the UEE is that the other local space-faring races are bound by some kind of agreement not to fight you.”
Shuul hissed. “No. They are bound not to attack us on this planet. All other Gaethe worlds have been under siege for centuries in an effort to prevent the expansion of our power. Earth is the first world we have cl
aimed inhabited by a sentient race. We chose to do so because the alliance you speak of will not interfere with such a planet.”
The implications were obvious. “Wait, so were the other planets the Gaethe colonized under the control of other races, or…”
Shuul growled, a weirdly pretty noise when done in harmony. “No! We chose them because they were uncontested. It was only when the draas grew to protect us and our colonies became capable of holding the line against the races who tried to invade us that they allied to prevent our spread. Had those peoples let us be, we would have continued our conquest bloodlessly. As it was, the only way to sate the need was to colonize a world with thinking beings, somewhere outside their sphere of influence.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Those motherfuckers! You’re telling me if they’d have just kept their big boy pants on and not been scared to death of you, you never would have invaded Earth?”
Shuul tried to parse that. “I understand your words separately, but the idioms are foreign. But yes, I think I grasp your meaning. You are correct. We only chose this place as a last resort. It was that, or attempt to wage an interstellar war against enemies who outnumbered us thirty to one.”
I took a deep, calming breath. “I assume Vera and the rest of the leadership knows this.”
Shuul shrugged. “I thought you knew it. I haven’t mentioned it, but I find it hard to believe such information is unknown to your people.”
I wanted to argue, to make the point that communication between our species was almost nonexistent. I couldn’t do it honestly, however. As a Blue I lived a relatively sheltered life, but even I knew human ingenuity mixed with our capacity to ferret out information was too potent for that level of ignorance. People knew; they had to.