by Bodicea
This did not seem to matter to Tamarind. “Half a billion people died in the initial assault, so we estimate. The Aurelians did not come right away. They held off. While they did, the dust and smoke from the destruction they had wrought rose into the sky. It cooled the planet. There were some crop failures, but the worst was the fall of the civilization. Another two hundred million died before the first Aurelian ships appeared in the sky.”
“Why did they hold off?”
“They wanted to arrive as heroes … the saviors of a dying world and a devastated people.
Coronado projected her face into the sky over all the surviving population centers, and told the population that the planet had been the victim of a freak meteor storm. The Aurelians, who happened to be nearby as this catastrophe occurred, said they had come to help. The Bodicéans, having had the legs of their civilization kicked out from under them, embraced their new saviors with open arms.”
“How did you survive?”
“We regained control of our ship, glided to a landing. We hid out in one of the surviving cities for a time, until the Aurelians came. Then, it was no longer safe. We fled to a camp in the north country. The people of our city were less fortunate. They knew the truth of the Aurelians from us. After we fled, the Aurelians had them all killed.” Miller shook his head. “Bastards.”
“We stayed in the north country for three years, organizing a movement of Defiance. We were betrayed, our camp destroyed, half of us killed, my mistake… before fleeing here. This cell is far more defensible.”
“How many of you are there, in your Defiance?”
“11,000 in total. A little less than 6,000 men, a little more than 5,000 women.”
“Aurelians notwithstanding.” Miller exhaled. “11,000 is a lot of people, but Pegasus can accommodate all of you, relocate you to a safer…”
Tamarind held up a hand and closed his eyes, cutting him off. “We are staying.”
“I admire your courage, but 11,000 is not nearly enough people to defeat Aurelia. If you are expecting support from the home-systems, there is no guarantee that they will come to your aid.”
“To defeat the Aurelians, we need only to hold out long enough to outlast them. We have numbers enough for that. The Aurelians sustain themselves by sucking the life from worlds and then moving on. They do not seek a permanent occupation. When they leave, we will rebuild.”
Tamarind then asked him. “Don’t you wish to see your wife?”
“If our business is done.”
“It is, for now,” he turned to one of the men who flanked him. “Take him to the shelter of Captain Jones.” The guard saluted and gestured for Miller to follow.
As Miller turned to leave the cave, Tamarind spoke after him. “Please send Lt. Honeywell from the ship. We have learned a lot about the Aurelians that you will find interesting and useful… also terrifying.”
His escort led him outside again, and into the trees. They walked in silence, crossing a deep ravine by means of a huge fallen tree. Miller sensed he was ever under surveillance by troops hidden among the brush. This and the heat made the hairs on his neck prickle and erect themselves.
They came to a halt a couple of kilometers later. Like everything else, her shelter blended perfectly into the landscape, but unlike the others it was recognizable, if you looked hard enough, as something else. Beneath sheets of camouflage netting, if you looked at it just right, you could see the much-battered form of what had at one time been an Aves called Basil.
The escort went to the hatch and slid it open, manually, just enough to call in. “Captain Jones, he’s here.” He paused, then turned to Miller. “She will see you.” A strange feeling rose in Miller’s chest, like his heart was simultaneously lighter, heavier, and ready to explode. There was no name for the emotion he was feeling, and he allowed himself a moment of hubris to think that no one had ever felt this way before. That ancient human playwright and poet, Spear-Shaker, or whatever his name was, had not had to deal with the effects of time dilation and faster-than-light travel on relationships.
He slipped in through the hatch.
The interior of the ship had been thoroughly stripped of instruments and equipment. The landing couches and tables rearranged into a near parody of a living room. Spartan accommodation, Miller thought, but they were in keeping with the existence of a resistance force in occupied territory.
Then, there was Jones.
She stood in the foredeck, the only person in the compound not dressed in black, but in some variant of Bodicéan civilian apparel. Her arms were crossed, and he could not tell whether she was happy to see him or not. Sixteen years had passed. She was now nearly as old as Commander Keeler. Not old, not even truly middle-aged, but the lines on her face and on her hands, the streaks of whitish gray in her blond hair, these were the hallmarks of a maturity that was beyond him.
“You look beautiful,” he said, nearly breathless.
She uneasily smiled. “Thank you.”
He held out his arms. Slowly, like a stray cat approaching a piece of proffered meat, she moved toward him, and finally allowed herself to be taken into his embrace. He kissed her neck, took in her scent, which was the same as he remembered. He felt her tears against his skin.
Then, his mind connected. He felt her, and he knew it was her, because she was the only one he had ever been able to touch with his mind.
He held her for a few moments longer, then slowly, they came apart again. He looked into her eyes, and saw that tears were still in them. The line of her mouth was set hard.
“How did you survive the crash?” he asked her.
She looked blank for a second. For him, the crash was a couple of months ago, for her sixteen years, and she had to dredge it up past other things, more important things, that were in her mind.
“The warhead took out our entire power network. We lost everything, including propulsion. We were falling from the sky. Finally, at 5,000 meters, seconds from impact, Tamarind pulled himself into the second seat. I don’t know how he did it. The ship was in a steep dive. Fighting the centripetal forces would have been too much for any other man.
Somehow, he made it to the command module, got in the co-pilot’s seat. I didn’t think it would do any good. Our power was gone, but just as he took the controls, an auxiliary fuel cell came back on-line. It was just enough power to stabilize our descent. Between the two of us, we were able to crash-land the ship in a remote area of the planet. Damage was extensive. There were injuries.”
“Tamarind nursed the single fuel cell back to life. He used it to set up a communication link with our Shrieks. A handful had survived the attack. He carefully hid away most of them, and brought one of them to our location. We salvaged its fuel cells and everything else we could to get Basil up and working again. The Aurelians stayed away at first, and then were too busy with the invasion to think about us. There were hundreds of landing ships coming, all the time. They blotted out the sun. The world-ship moved into a close orbit, and eclipsed the sun for a time.”
“When we had restored enough power to Basil, we flew into one of the planet’s wilderness areas. Deep, deep woods, ancient trees, it was a place Tamarind had chosen. Somehow, he had become our leader. There were just twelve of us, and him, but we knew our hope for survival lay in following him.
“Of course the Aurelians did find us, and then we had to leave…” She broke off, there was something more important. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Whatever it is, I …”
She held up a hand, and wiped her eyes with the other. “Don’t finish that. Don’t say it.
You don’t understand.”
There was nothing for him to do but stare at her. She called to the back of the ship. “Sam!
Max! you can come out now.”
He turned to see two boys, the older was probably twelve, the younger nine or ten, emerging cautiously from the rear of the ship. They went to Jones, putting themselves close to her while keeping
watchful, suspicious eyes on him.
He could feel her answer in his mind before she spoke. “Phil, these are my sons, Sam and Max. Sam and Max, this is Phil Miller.”
Miller got the wet-slap feeling again, multiplied by a factor of a million.
He looked at the kids. Their hair was reddish and too long, but they were clean. They looked healthy and well-fed, but had an inappropriate fear in their eyes from living too long under siege. When he saw in their sea-ice eyes and the firm, delicate line that ran from their ears to the bottoms of their chins, he knew that these were not war orphans she had adopted.
These were progeny, sprung from her loins.
He looked at the kids, and saw in them a lifetime he had missed.
He looked at the kids, realizing he had no idea what to do with this information.
The younger boy came forward, and addressed him with a kind of rebel confidence.
“You’re Lt. Commander Miller, Chief Tactical Officer of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus?”
“Za, I am that guy, and you are…”
“Sam,” the boy extended his hand. Miller grasped it as the boy continued, “You’re the man who used to be married to our mom, a long time ago.”
“Not so very long,” Miller answered automatically. The boy had a firm, warm grip. Not like Tobias, it brought back the memory of shaking hands with Jones’s father.
“I never really believed we would ever meet you,” the boy continued.
“He said we would,” the older boy said quietly.
“Who?” Miller asked.
“Tamarind,” Jones answered. “Would you two mind going out for a while. I think this man and I need to talk.”
The boys pulled away from her and went toward the hatch, the older more slowly than the younger. He spared his mother a protective last glance before leaving.
“Don’t forget your guns,” she told them. No one in the Defiance went out disarmed. The boys grabbed Odyssey-Issue pulse cannons from a locker near the hatch. No Aurelian weapons for them. Nothing but the best for my kids, Miller thought.
“Is he their father?” Miller asked when they had gone, feeling like he had invented a knew emotion just for the occasion; two parts anger, six parts regret, five parts jealousy, shake well and serve with a twist of disbelief. “Is it Tamarind?” Didn’t you always like the moody, rebellious type?
“Tamarind is celibate,” she answered. “It’s rather curious, but do you know of all the women who have given birth in this cell, none of them have ever borne a female?”
“Who is their father?” Miller repeated. He could not have cared less about other women.
Jones took a deep breath and answered him. “Tobias.”
Of all of the men she could have chosen. “Tobias?” he repeated in disbelief. “Tobias?”
“What was I to do, Phil?” she answered him, obviously sucking on her own version of the same emotional cocktail he was. “You were gone, and you were never coming back for all we knew. You can’t being to imagine what we’ve been through down here. Eight years… eight years fighting for our lives. We’ve been attacked, captured, tortured, brutalized. We almost starved to death the Winter Max was born. Our old camp was burned by incendiary bombs.
Half the cell died before we could escape and it took us almost a year to lose the Aurelians and come to this valley.
“We were holding out in the ruins of an old Bodicéan power station. We only had enough power and ammunition for two days, but somehow, Tamarind made it last for three weeks until help arrived. It was so cold. That’s when it began.” She paused, and drew in a deep breath. “Tobias saw that I was cold. He told me to come under the blanket with him and Pieta.
When he held me, it was the first time in days I hadn’t felt cold.”
“I don’t want to hear this story. I can’t hear this story right now!” Miller cut her off with a voice that didn’t sound like his. Pegasus had been gone forty-seven days, and sixteen years had passed on this planet. A year every three days, basically. So, she had waited how long, on his time-scale, before bringing that Tobias into her bed. In the time it took him to walk from his quarters to the bridge, how many days had passed? How many times had she made love to him in the time it took him to eat a meal or evacuate his bowels? In one night’s sleep in his quarters, the seeds that had been planted in his wife’s belly had grown into babies and been launched screaming into this horrible and defeated world that had gone down without a fight.
In his mind’s eye, he saw himself standing across from her, against a constantly shifting background of nights chasing days at a furious pace, staring into her face the lines formed and her hair lost its luster, the same lines he was staring into now. The footprints of time.
And the collected weight of all those years hit him, knocked him down, and it would be a long time before it would let him up again.
“I divorce you,” he told her.
“You’re too late,” she told him.
Knowing that there were survivors, the boss became obsessed with visiting the planet himself. The Tactical guys tried to talk him out of it, Bodicéa being still a war zone, or, at least, occupied territory.
He stood his ground, rambled on and on about his need to put his feet on the ground, see for himself the reality of the situation at ground zero, walk the paths his men had walked and all that litter.
Against the advice of everyone but his first officer, the boss arrived a day later on the Aves Zilla , with Lt. Alkema at his side, of course.
.
The survivors of the Basil, along with some wives, husbands, and children who had appeared in the intervening years, stood in the landing area. Their posture was perfect, their faces were stoic, but tears were leaking from their eyes as the commander’s Aves came to a landing.
Keeler stood at the hatch, looking out over them, and shouted. “Heroes!” They all but jumped. No one in the Defiance shouted unless lives were at stake.
Keeler continued, only a little less loudly. “You were told Pegasus was destroyed in the battle for this planet. Rumors of our destruction have since proven greatly exaggerated.”
In his original speech, he had written, “Rumors of our cowardly retreat, however, were incredibly accurate,” but he had taken that out.
Keeler shouted again. “Heroes! All of you. Princes of Sapphire, Kings of Republic. The children of our planets will sing songs in your honor.”
With that he stepped from his ship, Alkema behind him, and approached Tamarind. He approached him properly, not as a former subordinate, but as someone who commanded and army twice as big as his crew, who were willing to live and die by his command. He stood at the head of the survivors, a young boy with a shaved head at his side.
“It is good to see you, again, Commander,” Tamarind said pleasantly. “I hope you are pleased with our work?”
Keeler nodded. “Indeed. Did you think we had abandoned you?”
Tamarind shook his head. “I knew you too well to believe that.”
“If we had known there were survivors…”
“Your command decision was correct.”
“We could have done more.”
“You did enough, Pegasus made the difference, you know. You destroyed more than half the invasion fleet. They didn’t have enough ships or enough troopers to take over the whole planet. They have the cities, but everything else is ours.”
“Deep wilderness,” Miller said. “Eighty-five per cent of the land area.”
Keeler looked at his second officer. Miller looked as though he hadn’t slept since landing, and like someone had kicked him hard in the teeth and elsewhere.
“Come to the cave, there are some things you need to see.”
“Skinner!” Keeler ordered. “Check out these people.”
The silver haired medical technician sauntered forward, one eyebrow raised.
“Commander, nothing would give me more pleasure than ascertaining the wellness of these hearty freedom-fighters.”
&nbs
p; Tamarind led them back into his cave. “You should know, Commander, not all of your personnel will be returning to Pegasus. Yak Hewlett, Tigh Duk Sum, Cherish Bangladesh, and Ving Scientist intend to remain here, and continue fighting Aurelians. Some others are not yet decided. I have urged those with family connections to return.”
“What about Flight Captain Jones?” Keeler asked.
“She is still deciding. Watch out for that stalagmite.”
Keeler glanced downward. A sharp spit of stone had nearly emasculated him. How Tamarind had known this without turning around, he didn’t want to know.
“And you?” Keeler asked.
“I think you know what the answer to that is.”
Keeler nodded.
“In the fullness of time, I will give my life for this world, but for now, there is only the fight.” By then they had arrived at his command center. “Chamonix, show the commander intelligence file Coronado 227/89.”
It had been waiting for him. He it showed a tall, dark skinned man standing on a balcony, surrounded by adoring human syophants. In a deep, resonant voice, he was praising Bodicéans for their hard work at restoring their planet and for the warm welcome they had given the Aurelians. He announced that food supplies would be increased in the following quarter, and the Aurelians were setting up ecologically-responsible nurseries for the production of new medicinal herbs.
“Coronado,” Tamarind said.
“Coronado’s… changed,” Keeler said. “Something’s different about him… wait, wait, don’t tell me.”
“He’s a man, now,” Miller put in, irritated.
“Za, that’s it,” Keeler said.
“He exchanged bodies two years ago,” Tamarind explained. “A planet of women required a female conqueror. Now that they are established, he has reverted to his true form. Let me show you something else… I warn you, this next image is very disturbing. Chamonix, Intelligence File Eostre, 911/66 X”
Coronado froze and faded in mid-speech. The next image showed two naked Aurelian females lounging beside a large and bubbling pool of water. They whispered to one another and laughed, as though gossiping.