by David Ryker
The people packed into the Spartan hall, shoulders pressing into one another. The room was carved out of the base of a mountain, designed for civic events. A thick green ivy coated the wall behind the politicians and rustled in the slight breeze.
“He hides it well,” Hess replied, bored.
“You think he takes it all the time?” Alison dropped her voice low. The packed room hummed with interest.
Hess shook his head. Events had moved quickly, sweeping him along through the oceans of history as though he were an atom of water, pummeled by the churning currents of the poison sea. Loreto had arrived, dragging an alien species in tow. The admiral explained their presence and Alison noted the tension that seemed to exist between the First Fleet and the Exiles. But the man’s gamble was impressive; locking a technologically-superior species into an alliance against their will seemed to be a masterstroke of Machiavellian thinking.
Add to this, the Spartan Fleet had appeared from beyond the Pale. They’d established bases on the fringes of known space, Ghoulam explained, great docks which allowed them to slowly sever themselves from the Federation. These advanced fighters orbited above Agios-Nikon, joined by the dregs of the Senate’s Fleet, the forces Van Liden had held in reserve.
And so, in the Spartan capital, disparate forces gathered together, straining against their tentative alliances. The threat of the Symbiot hung over them, the tourniquet holding together the rotting peace. Days and nights passed, the stars replaced in the sky by massing fighters and battleships.
To ease the tensions, the politicians decided that a formal alliance was required. Hess watched the meeting unfold. Everyone wanted to be present. An alliance between Spartans and the Senate would be historical enough, but the leader of the Exiles sat opposite Saito and elevated everything in the room.
There was a feeling, Hess could taste it in the air. A mix of awe and anxiety. A hostile species, waiting to strike Sparta. A friendly species—of sorts—coming to humanity’s aid. People were scared.
Hess studied Saito. The president would have his face recorded; the images and the films of this event would pass down across generations. It would be his name written into the history books. As long as we survive, Hess added to himself.
But beneath the weight of history, Hess saw the fissures appearing, tempering his jealousy; he was beginning to feel in control. The metal container pressed into his hip, waiting in his pocket. Later, he knew, Saito would come to him and ask for more. He had plenty.
Alison, to his astonishment, had sourced the basa on a strange planet at a moment’s notice. As Saito’s mind fizzled, he’d only become more and more reliant on Hess. As hours stretched into days, as the realities of the situation became clearer, the president’s anxiety increased. Hess possessed the only cure.
But the president wasn’t alone. Every single person on Sparta was strung out with the tension. Hundreds of thousands of people descended on a city none of them knew and had to co-exist alongside a people they’d loathed their entire lives. Fights broke out constantly, petty squabbles over where to stand on the street and which buildings belonged to which force. The stressed, frightened people knew what was on the line.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hess told her. “Saito has never had to make a decision in his life. Not a real one.”
“You think he made the right decision?”
“Which decision?” he asked. The treaty or the drugs? He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
He watched the meeting, his eyes fixed on the president. This was not the same Saito who had beat him in the election. Hess had wanted to kill that person, had wanted to wrap his hands around his warm throat and squeeze and squeeze until everything went cold. This was a broken shell of a man.
But I’m not the same person either, he knew. Now, I don’t want to choke him. I can use him. I can chew him up and spit him out. Besides, he assured himself, if Saito does have to die, I want to be right there beside him. No one else is going to rob me of that particular pleasure.
“What’s under their masks?” Alison sounded curious.
Hess looked at the Exiles. They were strange, he thought. But strangely human. Whether they were replicating human mannerisms, or he was projecting his own onto their actions, he couldn’t tell. No one knew how many of them there really were; they’d only sent a portion of their Fleet. Mostly, they kept to their only ship. Only a few dozen ever made it to the surface of Sparta.
“I can only see the smoke,” he admitted. “Something glowing, too.”
“I bet we’ve all got a different vision of it,” Alison thought aloud, “in our heads, I mean.”
She was right, Hess knew. No one understood what the Exiles looked like, not really. So each individual could imagine an alien exactly to their liking. If they imagined an ally, then that was what lurked behind the smoke. If they imagined a monster, then the mask would be hiding untold horrors. Hope and dread, awe and fear.
“What about him?” Alison was looking at Loreto.
The admiral sat at the table alongside the president and the Exile. He seemed uninterested and drained. He leaned back in his chair and kept looking to his bearded captain for information and updates.
“I think he just wants to get it over with,” Hess said. “He seems sad.”
“Not what you want from your military leaders.”
“It’s all we’ve got left.”
“I heard he was crazy.” Alison bit her nail. “Past it, is what I heard.”
“Who told you that?”
“You know, Acton.” She dropped her hand from his mouth and looked at him with her sincere eyes. “If you just ask people things, they’ll tell you what they think.”
“And what they think will be wrong.”
Hess had listened far too often to the complaints of people. Their opinions, their thoughts. Mental detritus to endure, rather than absorb. On the campaign trail, he had sat and listened earnestly to people who had no idea how the universe worked and all he could do was smile.
“This is the famous ‘Red Hand’ Loreto, scourge of the colonies? I remember hearing all about him and his family growing up.”
“On Mars?”
She nodded. Hess looked at the admiral again. He’d never said a word to the man before, but he could feel his pain. The look in his eye, the knowledge that every single person in the audience was going to be depending on him for their life. It was a heavy burden. It’s my burden, too, only no one knows it yet.
“So what am I wrong about, then?” Alison turned to him. The sincerity was gone. This was a challenge.
“Firstly,” Hess sighed, enjoying his chance to show off, “the whole ‘Red Hand’ thing is just a family name, his great, great–”
“I’m from Mars, Acton. I know who Red Hand Loreto was.”
“He formed the First Fleet, originally.”
“Don’t act like this is private information.”
“They taught you all this?”
“Yes.”
“On Mars?”
“Yes!”
“Then I’m sure they taught you the full and unbiased truth of the matter.”
Alison pursed her lips. Hess smirked. He knew exactly what stories she would have heard. He grew up on a colony, too. For every single colony brat in the Federation, the story of Assadias, the Clone King of Mars, was gospel.
“I can tell you exactly what happened,” she told him. “A guy rose up, one of the clones, and they made him their king. The people on Earth didn’t like it. When the king tried to declare independence from Earth, Red Hand Loreto got all his ships together and killed everyone and cut off the king’s head. That was the start of the Federation.”
It was exactly the same story the teachers had told him, Hess noted. But for a little orphan girl on Mars? The story would be joyous, sad, and essential, all at once. He didn’t want to take it to pieces with the truth.
“It’s a nice story,” he told her.
“Story?”
“A nice story,” he repeated. “We all heard it growing up.”
“So what’s wrong about it?”
The crowd around them were becoming restless. People were trying to listen. While not loud, their conversation was beginning to agitate those nearby. Hess dropped his voice even lower.
“You really want to know?”
“If it’s not true, I’d rather know. I don’t want you just lording it over me, patronizing me.”
“It’s a nice story,” Hess said again. “But the poor people, the clones, they were illegal. Products of weird experiments the land owners on Mars were running, trying to look for cheap labor. And the king? He wasn’t some organic emergence. They planted him there, to help control the clones. They wanted Mars for themselves. And he went mad.”
“You’re making it up, Hess.”
“It’s all in the records in the Alcázar. I assure you.”
“Then why cut off Assadias’s head? Why did Red Hand do that? He had blood on his hands.”
“Ask him.” Hess pointed to the admiral at the table. “He’ll tell you why you think his ancestor was a butcher.”
“He’s got the nickname, too. He’s biased.”
“And you’re a poor girl from Mars, is what he’d say.”
Alison punched him square in the arm. It hurt. But he didn’t dare show it. The Spartan doctors had done a fine job repairing the glass cuts in his palms, picking the shards from the open wounds. A bruise like this seemed beneath them.
“Be quiet.” A man turned around with annoyance painted all over his face. “This is history being made. Show some respect.”
A drug addict, an over-the-hill admiral, and a blackmailed alien, Hess wanted to say. History had a habit of sanding off the difficult edges.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Alison.
“Don’t you want to watch?”
He shook his head. He’d been watching the meeting; it was pure diplomacy, talking endlessly about nothing. The look on Loreto’s face said everything. He knew history wasn’t made in moments like this. It was only put on pause, squeezed in between the real decisions that shaped people’s lives.
In that way, he felt a comradery with the admiral. They were both outsiders, he knew, men loathed by the system who were happy to push back. But Loreto would hate me, he knew. Not like Saito and Van Liden and everyone else in that wretched system hates me. He’d hate me for who I am and it would be hard to disagree. It was the kind of hate Hess could respect.
“What if… Saito… you know, needs you?” Alison said quietly.
“Let him find me.” Hess had already thought about this. “Whenever he needs help—of any kind—he should come to me. Let’s see what he does.”
Before she could say anything else, he led her through the crowds. People pressed in, packed tight, trying to get a glimpse of history in the making. They walked upstream, pushing their way through, until the sunlight hit their faces and they found themselves on one of the floating walkways which connected the black mountains.
They walked through the Spartan city. Cultures collided. The locals and the Federation people, fresh from the First Fleet, avoided one another in the street, like charged electrons circling.
A pair of Exiles bobbed through the crowd, which parted ahead of them. Hess felt the ripple of commotion ahead and stretched to look. The aliens were taller than humans, mostly. Their heights varied, though their builds were all similar. Thin, lithe torsos and limbs wrapped in suits. It was impossible to see their skin. Instead, they wore devices and instruments and other unknown affectations.
They were engineers, Hess understood. They stopped suddenly in streets beside pools or lilies and bent down and measured them, discussing with one another the finer points in the language which no human understood.
From afar, they might even appear to be strange humans in suits. But, up close, the differences told. The helmet’s position on the neck, for instance, meant whatever was inside was nothing like a skull. It was too high and too far back, the front stretching too far forwards, almost like a heron waiting to strike. The fingers, Hess noticed, were long and supine, and each finger had five phalanges, which curled up almost into a spiral. When an Exile wished to touch something, these fingers unfurled like a proboscis. Occasionally, alien fingers fascinatedly approached human objects like butterflies swarming a flower garden.
Hess had not had time to watch their feet. But, out in the open, he could see them walk. They bobbed as they moved, like birds, with feet which ended in three stout toes and a heel. Whenever they picked up a foot, these wrist-thick toes curled up into a fist before spreading and bending to bear the weight of the next step.
It was their knees which he found most strange. Unlike a human leg or a horse, their knees moved in any direction. As they walked, their legs would move through a series of contortions and contractions, stuttering and careful but always smooth.
When walking alongside humans, they seemed to mimic the local gait. When moving alone, they appeared more loping and faster. When stopping, the knees locked into a straight posture and held. When the Exiles bent, they could sweep their bodies impossibly low without swaying.
Hess tried not to stare. There were many of the aliens wandering through the defenses of the city, the guns and the barricades and the ships moving above them. They were taking it all in, measuring it, inspecting everything.
Their curiosity unnerved him. On the rare occasions Hess had come face to face with an Exile, he’d felt scrutinized, as though he were being evaluated on an atomic level, even if their faces were only lights moving behind a smoke screen.
Hess had told Alison that the Exiles and the Spartans were perfect for one another. They were engineers, the both of them. They wanted to know how the world worked in every tiny way. And, he worried, the Spartans would benefit most from this interaction with alien tech. If we ever beat the Symbiot, they’re going to have a head start with the kind of expertise the rest of us could never hope to understand.
Already, their shield tech was being upgraded, as were their guns, the Exiles advising on how to eek extra power out of the primitive human machines. No wonder Ghoulam was happy.
As Hess and Alison crossed another square, they heard Ghoulam’s joyous voice calling out. The Spartan leader spied the pair and climbed down from the barricade he had mounted.
“Not long now!” he called, still climbing down.
“Till you’re ready?” Alison wondered, looking around at the preparations.
“Till they get here. The Symbiot. We’re watching them. Loreto and his people closed down the trace gate when they came through. It’s a closed system now. They’re locked in here with us.”
“Or we’re locked in with them.” Hess was less optimistic.
The Spartan laughed with his belly and leaned against the stone barricade.
“I thought you would be in with Saito and Loreto,” Alison said.
He shrugged, fishing a bottle of water from his overalls and sipping it.
“I don’t care for mindless chit chat. I want to make sure my people are ready.”
“You don’t want to be involved with battle plans, or command, or anything like…”
“It’s all talk.” Ghoulam shook his head. “Let Loreto sit in his bubble and shout. I’ll be making a difference where it matters most.”
“So he’s in charge?”
The Spartan looked out at his people as they milled through the city, scurrying this way and that, preparing everything.
“There are other ways to lead,” he said, ending the discussion.
Hess had noticed that the people turned and looked to their leader as they passed, taking their cues from him. Straightening their backs, as he did. Smiling wide, as he did. Even in spite of it all.
“How long do we have?” asked Alison.
Ghoulam shrugged and poured the remaining water over his head.
“Could be any time. They’re there. They’re ready. Don�
��t know what they’re waiting for. Could be days. Weeks. Minutes. We’re watching them, though.”
The man seemed to be enjoying himself. All that worry and dread which had settled over so many others was entirely absent from the Spartan leader. Even Alison, Hess could tell, was worried. Her mind, usually sharp and focused, was beginning to wander down irrelevant, tangential corridors of thought.
“Hey!” Ghoulam shouted through them. “Not there! It needs to be facing north-north-east. Take it to Sliti. Move it!”
Behind them, a pair of Spartans hefted a gun turret back on a hover-cart and pushed it farther down the barricade. The crowd flocked around them, bubbling like the waterfalls of Agios-Nikon.
“You sound confident.” Hess tried to hide the accusation.
“We’re all going to die.” Ghoulam spread his smile wide. “Why shouldn’t we be happy?”
“Because we’re all going to die,” said Alison and Ghoulam laughed.
The words hit Hess hard. We’re all going to die, he repeated to himself. It felt wrong to actually say it out loud, to admit it. He had been so tired, so busy, so hurt, so occupied that he had not stopped to think about the actual, physical process of dying. The idea was no longer abstract but the Spartan leader did not seem worried.
“We’ve been waiting for a war for centuries,” Ghoulam told them. “We waited. We prepared. We have thought about this moment for a long time. It gets to you after a while, that kind of mindset. Eventually, you just want something to happen, you know?”
“So you’re happy to die?” Alison looked from one man to the other, searching for an answer.
“No, no.” Ghoulam waved a hand. “But I expect to die. As do you, right? Eventually. You stop seeing this as a curse and start seeing it as an opportunity. The chance to take everything you want.”
“That’s insane,” Alison said. “You’re insane.”
“It would be insane to think you will live forever,” said the Spartan. “Perhaps sanity is just a matter of perspective.”