Withûr We

by Matthew Bruce Alexander

  He stood on that hillside at night, surrounded by that display of violence, and felt shame wash over him. He felt no fear, no anxiety, not even anger, but rather a stinging shame, as if called upon to give an account of his species before some universal court and, faced with such a damning exhibit, he could not. His body, like a wax figure on the verge of melting, slouched, and for a moment he had an urge to chuck the ignition key into the forest, cast himself on the ground and let everything disintegrate around him.

  This urge he conquered and he ran down the hillside and into the forest. It occurred to him he was not familiar with the area, and he was glad Kregel took a direct route to the hill so he could find his craft again. After a few minutes, when he figured he must be getting close, he felt a sudden sharp pain in his ankle and he pitched forward and fell face first onto the forest floor. A stick on the ground gashed his forehead and some rocks scraped his right hand. His first reaction was to grab at his ankle, and he discovered nothing was broken despite the formidable pain he was feeling.

  He was some minutes in recovering the ignition key, which flew out of his hand and which, lacking his special vision, he would never have found. When the key proved to be undamaged, he thanked whatever god might be listening and limped through the forest. Desperate to get back to his vessel as soon as he could, he fought through the pain in his ankle, permitting himself no sign of weakness greater than a wince, an occasional grunt and a limp.

  When he finally reached the clearing, he found Gregory and Layla at the top of the exit ramp, holding each other and staring at the sky. They looked down when they heard Alistair’s footsteps on the ramp. Their expressions changed from one of helpless resignation to sharp concern, and if he could have seen his bloodied visage it would have been apparent why. Gregory went halfway down the ramp to meet his friend and help him the rest of the way up.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Fine.”

  “You took forever.”

  “I got the key.”

  Inside the craft, Alistair flipped a switch and turned on the lights lining the hallway on the floor and ceiling. Leaning on a struggling Gregory, he made his way to the cockpit.

  “Are we going to make it?” asked Layla, trailing behind.

  “I don’t know,” said Alistair. “They came a few hour before the deadline. I don’t know when the Aradnium field will be ready, or even if we are still in contact with the team down there.”

  Now in the cockpit, he knelt between the two pilot’s seats, pulled up a panel of flooring and began to install the ignition key.

  “Anything I can do?” asked Greg.

  “Can you fly?”

  The question needed no answer.

  A flash lit up the inside of the cockpit, and Layla gasped. Looking out the windshield, Alistair saw the aftereffects of an explosion within a few tens of yards, its sound unable to reach their ears. Redoubling his efforts, he let out a shout of triumph a moment later, hobbled into the pilot’s seat and started the engine.

  “I suggest you take a seat somewhere else,” he said.

  Instead, Gregory moved into the copilot’s seat and Layla sat on Greg’s lap.

  “The key,” said Alistair as the craft dislodged itself from gravity’s grip and slowly fell into the air until it was above the tree tops, “is to make an exit without attracting notice. I think we’ll head south first.”

  They crept along, almost brushing the tops of the tallest trees, their exterior lights off. They would not escape detection by any instruments, but it would hide them from the human eye. Increasing speed, they were alternately lit up by flashes and cast back into gloom. With the soundproof walls of the craft, their escape was like passing through a muted threedy. All they heard was their own tremulous breathing and nervous swallowing in the dark cockpit, but a light display played for their eyes. Alistair pressed a button to light the dashboard and produced a readout display in 3D.

  “The Aradnium field is increasing.”

  “Do we have time?” asked Layla.

  “Unknown.”

  Eventually, the forest gave way to fields, the ground blurred and the battle fell behind them. Not long after, the ground became pitch black, flat and smooth and they knew they were over open water. Alistair turned the craft west, continuing to pick up speed. A few minutes later they were out of sight of land and he turned the craft north. He continued to fly low, a hundred feet above sea level, but now moved with greater speed than a bullet and still accelerated. He struck a few more buttons and the 3D display became a globe of the moon with a dot of light representing their craft.

  ‘I don’t know if we have an hour, five hours or five minutes,” he said. “I’m going to up the acceleration. One of you should find a better seat. And when we break… hold on tight.”

  Gregory and Layla made their way to Alistair’s bedroom, the only room free of cargo, and strapped themselves into chairs. He gave them a minute to get ready and then, his hand on the lever, increased the rate of acceleration. Before long, it was almost painful. Still they increased speed, and despite the design of the craft he knew they would be trailing smoke and fire behind them. He could see the flames from the compacted oxygen fluttering in front of the craft.

  Finally, he stopped accelerating, allowing himself a moment to catch his breath before he squeezed the handle of a lever and twisted it around, rotating the ship. The Aradnium field was steady. He began to decelerate. Now facing the other way, the deceleration caused the same sensation as the acceleration had done: he was driven with ever more power into his seat. He withstood the extreme pressure for a couple minutes before, through his squinting, bleary eyes, he saw they were going to fall short of their target and slowed the deceleration.

  The sun was creeping over the northern horizon. The ocean below was more white than blue, and as it streaked by it showed in the light hue of blue it produced. Alistair stared at that southern horizon for a time, the horizon of his home for many months, the horizon of a grain of sand in a colonized strip of galaxy measuring a thousand light years from end to end, a backwater moon in a backwater system. For a time, it had been pleasant, even exciting. He knew he would never see it again, and the thought both thrilled him and produced a melancholy regret, a nostalgia for what had almost been and an excitement for what might yet be.

  He did not allow his musing to distract him for long and decelerated again. By the time he reached the vicinity of the northern pole, they were going a mere thousand miles per hour. His computer detected another ship nearby, on a gigantic flow of ice, and he approached until he could see it through the windshield. Setting his vessel down a rugby field away from what he knew was Santiago’s craft, Alistair unfastened his seatbelt and pressed the intercom button.

  “We’re on the ground.”

  A glance at the readings indicated the Aradnium field was still holding steady. He rose from his chair, making sure to first set an alarm to warn him when the field changed, and limped to meet Gregory and Layla at the exit.

  “Want a taste of home?” he asked and pressed a button on the wall.

  The door slid open while the ramp extended. Frigid air poured into the craft, cold enough to make even Alistair blanch. Layla withdrew with a cry of distress.

  When the door was open and the freezing wind had free rein to whip at them, Alistair, dressed for the tropics, stepped out onto the exit ramp, took a deep breath, and tossed an arm into the air to wave goodbye to Santiago. He never knew whether Santiago saw him or not, for his alarm went off and he went back inside, pressing the button to close the exit, and back to the cockpit. Layla and Gregory joined him a second later.

  “Look!” said Layla, pointing out the windshield. “The other ship is blinking its lights!”

  “He probably can’t communicate with the increased field.”

  “I thought the field wouldn’t reach here.”

  “It reaches here, but it’s weaker.”

  He found a light control switch in his own cockpit and blink
ed his lights a few times. When the other vessel stopped, so did he.

  “How much longer?” asked Layla.

  “I don’t know. Hell, they could lose control of the equipment and not be able to stop it.”

  “But we can still leave, right?”

  “Sure, as long as we stay in the pole until we are far enough away.”

  “So we can go now?”

  Alistair considered her point. “Any last words for Srillium?”

  “Goodbye,” Layla said decisively.

  “We hardly knew ye,” said Greg.

  “Here’s to a long trip home,” said Alistair, and then they lifted off the ground.

  Santiago’s spacecraft, a good deal smaller than Alistair’s, was off the ground only seconds later. They fell into the sky, impelled by gravitophotons, becoming black dots beyond the clouds and, finally, disappearing altogether.

  ***

  There were five people amid the ruins, a mix of burned log cabins and the twisted metal of crashed aircraft. Long, charred gashes in the earth still smoked, but there were no longer any bodies strewn about. Two of the figures were probably men, but as they were dressed in battle gear, it was difficult to say. With the miniature cannons mounted on their helmets they kept watch over Miklos who, arms bound behind his back, knelt on the earth. A woman, dressed in a business suit with pants, wearing high heels that kept sinking too far into the soil and carrying an electronic clipboard, surveyed the scene while Angus, hobbling on a crutch due to a wounded leg, stood nearby.

  “When we finally landed our battalions on the surface they were fighting each other,” the woman remarked as she inspected some wreckage. She apparently expected an answer from Angus, because after a slight pause she turned from the wrecked aircraft and gave him an expectant look.

  Angus shrugged and tried to think of something to say. “People always fightin’ each other.”

  “But why were they fighting?”

  Angus shook his head and looked down at the ground. Seeing she would get no answer from the man from Tantramon, she looked to Miklos, who gave her a defiant stare.

  “Why were they fighting?”

  “It’s not your business. Just consider yourself lucky, or you’d never have won.”

  She became interested in her clipboard and only gave half her attention to Miklos when she responded. “You were outnumbered twenty to one; I don’t think anything was going to save you.”

  “My people whipped the Persians at Marathon with worse odds than that,” he growled with all the pride of a prisoner who refuses to submit.

  After a moment more at her clipboard, she looked up. “It was Thermopylae. And you lost.”

  “It was Marathon.”

  “I’m not going to argue with a convicted war criminal. So obviously you somehow raided Floralel and used what you stole to take out other Gaian cities. Then you divided into four kingdoms and, being a bunch of rapists and thieves, immediately started fighting over territory. Is that about it?”

  “You’re a piss-poor historian,” said Miklos and spat.

  The woman was unperturbed. “Who was the head of the kingdom here?”

  “We didn’t have kingdoms. Like I said, history’s not your strong suit. There were three, well, four main security firms. Everyone lived where they wanted and did what they wanted. If you needed protection or arbitration, you could hire a firm. They sold insurance too.”

  “Where were the borders?”

  “There weren’t any boundaries. They were businesses. We looked for customers wherever we could find them.”

  “Four warlords all sharing the same territory? No wonder you were fighting. You are… Miklos Papadopolous? Which of the four did you fight for?”

  “I was with Ashley Security & Arbitration.”

  “Alistair Ashley 3nn. Can you tell us where he is? Where he would be hiding?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The woman typed for a moment on her clipboard and then nodded at the guards. “You can take him away.”

  As the guards seized Miklos and half dragged him back to a detention cell, Angus felt the impulse to speak to the woman. “Things work well for a while.”

  The woman, in turning around, stepped out of her high heel shoe lodged in the mud. Grumbling, she reinserted her foot and did not hear what Angus said.

  “When I first come here, everythin’ fine,” he repeated.

  The woman spared him a quick glance and said, “Paradise was short lived.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you can blame Alistair for that. Things hard on Srillium, no matter how you live. Conditions always gonna be hard here. And people hurtin’. But when I come here, I put down naked and hungry, like a million people before me. In an hour I have a job and a meal. If I come here two years before, I get sacrificed and eaten, no mistake on that.”

  She considered his words with a skeptical look. “I still don’t understand exactly what was happening on this rock, but whatever experiment you were running, it failed. Even if we hadn’t been here to put it down, you were at each other’s throats.”

  “People always at each other’s throats on Srillium. Like I say, people here hurtin’. There old wounds that don’t heal. That somethin’ anybody has to deal with, president, king, anarchist. You talkin’ to a man alive because Alistair’s system better. As long as I live you won’t hear me say different.”

  “Interesting. Nevertheless, it fell.”

  “It falls. But anythin’ gonna fall when you come. While it lasts, it works. Alistair says any system limited by the people in it. Well, I tell you, we got people angry, hurtin’, wantin’ revenge. If you don’t come maybe they work it out, maybe they don’t, but only Alistair gives ‘em a chance to. He the only one who believes in it for a while, and he tries to make it spread with people who don’t believe, not ready yet. But they start to believe, a little at a time. Maybe not quick enough, but that not his fault. But his mistake, he stubborn and makes his woman angry. He tells us to work things out, cooperate, but on one issue he tries to impose himself. But it a good system. I know cause I live in it.”

  The woman clearly did not follow Angus’ speech, and not following it, she dismissed it as nonsense. She took down one more serial number from the side of a downed aircraft and then made her way back to her camp. Angus, unmoving, watched her go.

  “But Darion gets away,” he said. “And your biggest client probably wiped out by the Juggernaut. So maybe you strong, but maybe you don’t last. Maybe this fight not over yet. Maybe somethin’ just startin’ to wake up.”

  This last private speech delivered, Angus hefted his crutch and hobbled away, moving in the opposite direction.

  End of Part II

  PART III

  Chapter 85

  Stars in the G category, like the Terran sun, had proved to have the planets most propitious for human colonization. They are a good deal larger than the majority of stars in the universe. Driving an auto through the center of a G class star – if one could accomplish such a feat – at a speed customary to the average highway and never pausing once for a break or to sleep, a person could spend well over a year getting from one side to the other. If such a star were shrunk to the size of a period on a page, the nearest star, in that zone of the Milky Way colonized by humans, would be several miles away. Like the atom, the galaxy is mostly empty space.

  Only a sailor on a submarine experiences anything akin to what a traveler in interstellar space feels, and even then it is but a weak version of it. Such a traveler finds himself in a tiny bubble hospitable to his needs, surrounded by a vast emptiness inimical to them. In the deepest oceans of the galaxy, the submarine is never more than a few miles from the surface, but the spaceship is often, from the nearest star, at a distance one describes as immense, or enormous. Such words, though, were invented for different uses, when an enormous distance meant the width of the Atlantic Ocean, when immense meant the prairie between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. It is best to call space inconc
eivably huge and there let the matter rest.

  A man may say that Rome is far from Berlin, having made the journey, and rightly claim to know what far means. Space travel is entirely different. No winds buffet the vehicle, no scenery streaks by, even the stars exhibit parallax at a glacier’s pace. Without the instruments in the cockpit, one has absolutely no sense of movement, cannot distinguish between a ship at rest and one speeding at a light-year per day. Consequently, though a man may travel from one star to another, he still cannot conceptualize, cannot feel or imagine the distance he has traveled. He can read that another man is six feet tall and have an idea to go along with the datum. He may learn that a train travels at three hundred kilometers per hour and have a sense of what that speed entails. If he reads that Tantramon is 2.4 quadrillion miles from Arcabel, he has only the number and, if he is wise, a profound sense of humility.

  When the ship left Srillium’s gravity and slowed to an easier acceleration, Layla unstrapped herself and went to an antechamber filled with supplies. Crawling over, around and through the many crates and sacks, with her back nearly scraping the ceiling, she came to a window at the back and pressed her forehead against it. She could see a wedge of Srillium the gas giant stuck in the corner of the window, but her eyes were drawn to the blue and green dot, with a splotch of white in the middle: Srillium the moon, as seen from above the north pole. The expression on her face as she watched it shrink was something like a wife’s watching the departing train carrying her husband to war.

  When Alistair rotated the ship, the view from Layla’s window changed and she lost sight of the world that was her home for several years and all her adult life. It was a hard world and treated her cruelly, prematurely forcing her into adulthood and enslaving her, but it was what she knew. The world waiting at the end of a two year journey was unknown to her, and even Alistair and Gregory were unsure in what state it would be if they managed to return.