by Michael Ryan
The scrubbing process was done in groups of twelve on a first-come, first-served basis. It was like going through one of the old-style car washes, with the purpose to ensure that nobody was bringing unwelcome microbes back to the ship. The wrong bug in a speck of mud on your boot could infect thousands before anyone knew what had happened, and there were lots of things on Purvas that many humans had no built-in immunity against.
There was something else on Purvas, not bacterial but not really viral either. There was no cure, even among the purvasts. The Common English word for the hybrid organism was Bicharada.
Twelve hundred years before purvasts developed starships, they’d experienced a planetwide plague. Like the Black Plague on Earth in the Middle Ages, the death toll had been devastating.
There are well-argued theories that if humans hadn’t experienced the plague, space travel would have been invented on Earth first and humans would have colonized Purvas instead of the other way around. Other theories for human late blooming included religious antiscience bias, imperialistic nations and an unwillingness to share technical data, and even the shape of the continents.
But much of life is comprised of unknowable mysteries, and regardless, you can’t change the past, although you can certainly rewrite history.
Callie was still in isolation a week later.
“How’s it going?” I asked into a speaker embedded into the glass that separated us.
She gave me a weak smile. “I’m bored, and I want to get laid.”
“Only three more days. It’ll go quickly.”
“Easy for you to say out there,” she said, pacing the small chamber like a cat.
“I’d change places with you if I could.”
“The white knight.” She sat and frowned.
“Sorry.” She hated it when I implied she needed to be rescued. I thought I’d change the subject to something pleasant, like discussing where we’d go on our next leave, but she brought up the pending hearing.
“You think I’ll be okay?” she asked.
“Sure, we did everything by the book,” I answered firmly. “You did nothing wrong. I can quote you the–”
“Leave it to the lawyers, Avery,” she said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“And I’ve changed my mind,” she snapped. “I’ll worry about it later.”
“Okay.”
She eyed me. “You think I’ll be okay?”
I sighed and tried not to smile. “I just said so.”
“Okay.”
Women.
She eyed me from beneath a knit brow. “Goddammit, Avery. Don’t patronize me.”
“Sorry,” I said under my breath. I knew being quarantined, and worrying about the panel she’d have to explain her actions to, had to be driving her crazy. “Let’s play chess,” I suggested.
“Sure. Pawn to D-4,” she said, employing her usual opening.
We played to a draw.
I eventually fell asleep outside the chamber and dreamt about outbreaks, plagues, and freezing to death alone.
Two days after Callie was cleared by medical, we appeared before the investigating committee for possible sanctions.
“Please sit,” an officer of the court said. “For the record, all parties are under oath and subject to section 46-B.”
Section 46-B was straightforward. The penalty for perjury was death, and all attorneys and witnesses were subject to the same rules. The Guritain legal system was non-adversarial, and the military justice code that governed the life of soldiers was based on the civilian system.
Each side had attorneys and could call witnesses that supported their position or theory about the facts of a case, but nobody tried to win. There was no winning if the truth didn’t prevail, and from my understanding, the Guritains hadn’t executed a lawyer in over a decade. There was no similar option to what the Americans had once called the Fifth Amendment, as the idea that a Guritain wouldn’t want the truth to prevail was unknown. Soldiers never went to trial; they simply told the truth and allowed the jury of judges to decide what punishment was appropriate.
Callie’s case, a capital offense if she was found willfully negligent in the abandonment and destruction of her armor, required the highest level of formality. The military had already lost a suit. There was no reason to also lose a soldier if it could be avoided, but the judges wouldn’t hesitate to rule for execution if that was the way the facts bore out. We both testified for hours, describing the situation and our decisions.
Then the court played back the entire episode using the audio and visual retrieved from my suit’s computer.
With all accounts matching, there wasn’t any need for an investigation. The court ruled she’d acted inside the bounds of the law, and we were dismissed.
“That made me nervous,” she said.
I put my arm around her shoulder. “I told you we’d done nothing wrong.”
“Yeah, but the law can be twisted and interpreted in weird ways,” she said. “I’ve seen it happen.”
“I don’t see how. It’s straightforward.”
“It’s not straightforward when interpreting words in the code. What does reasonable mean? What does it mean when they say, ‘actions that would fall into the normal range of behaviors expected by similar troops in the same, or similar, situation, under the same, or similar, battle conditions,’ and so on? I don’t think you can say that words like reasonable and average and expected and–”
“I get it,” I said, interrupting her nervous chatter.
“Do you?” she asked in a demanding tone.
“Yes. Let’s go eat.”
She pushed my arm off her shoulder. “Don’t patronize me.”
“Let’s eat and then have sex.”
“Okay,” she said. “You win.”
“I’m not trying to win,” I pleaded. “I’m just trying to–”
She stared into my eyes. “Drop it.”
“Okay. What are you in the mood for?”
“Sex first, and then we can eat.”
“Agreed,” I said. I put my arm back on her shoulder, and we walked the rest of the way to the bunks in silence.
Callie expunged her nervousness over the next few days. A week after the hearing, we’d returned to a familiar routine. Instead of furious sex, binging on desserts, and watching a lot of war movies – don’t ask me why we viewed so many war movies when we were in an actual war – we took long walks through the ship, played chess, and made love tenderly. She’d released a squad of demons the week before, and now she wanted to become an angel. I loved her more than life itself, and I couldn’t bear the times I dreamt of her death.
“We got orders,” she said one morning after checking her messages.
“And?” I asked while I rubbed her neck.
“We’re disembarking at the thread and then on standby for two days. Leaving on a civie transport back.”
“Earthside?” I asked in confusion.
“Exactly.”
TCI-Armor suits were built almost exclusively on Earth. The labor was cheaper than on Purvas.
“Not one of those–”
“Yeah.”
I got out of bed and opened my message-retrieval system so I could acknowledge our new orders. Sure enough, we were going to be boarding a Tsesarevich-class starship for the trip to Earth. The military was fond of chartering older starships and sending soldiers back like we were tourists on a very low budget. At least there hadn’t been explosions on a Tsesarevich for five or six years, and I was reasonably sure they’d worked out most of the kinks.
Seven hours later, we left the Amphoterus.
The trip down the elevator was breathtaking, and I wondered why so much beauty didn’t inspire peace. We found a new restaurant while stuck at the space-transfer station, and amused ourselves with browsing the shops, snuggling, and making love in our by-the-hour quarters as often as possible.
It was almost like being on leave, but n
ot quite that relaxing.
Our trip back up the elevator took place at night. I thought it was as breathtaking as the daytime trip. The city lights spread out below us as far as the eye could see for the first few kilometers of our ascent. As we traveled higher above the surface of Purvas and our visible horizon receded first to the wilderness and then to the sea, we saw flashes of orange-red light: distant explosions to remind us that war continued to rage between the planet’s two factions, and that we were still soldiers.
“What a waste,” I said, looking out the viewports.
“Careful,” Callie whispered in my ear. “Politicos are always going up and down the thread.”
“Politicos are asleep at this hour,” I pronounced.
“Probably.”
“How long do you think it’ll last?” I asked.
“The war?”
“No, the trip up the thread,” I said sarcastically.
“Forever.”
CHAPTER TEN
A kingdom will rise against another. There shall be famines, pestilences, earthquakes, plagues, droughts, and darkness. All these are only the beginning of sorrows and anguish.
~ Holy Writs of Vahobra, 34:26
The Tsesarevich-class starship was named the Hakudo Maru IV.
It wasn’t so uncomfortable.
Belkinotic drive accidents were relatively rare at this point, more because of the antiterrorism efficiency of the Gurts than any advances in intradimensional shift physics. Still, all ships leaping out of the Purvas system were required to travel a sol-unit beyond Dziko – just in case.
The Guritains and the Tedesconians had agreed to this policy for the same reason they’d banned viral and biological weapons, torture of prisoners, and using HE-P48s on civilian populations: it was easier to sell a war to the voters that way.
And because dead citizens can’t be taxed.
“You’re making your scrunchy face. What are you so focused on?” Callie asked.
“Making sense of sane war policies during the insanity of war,” I answered.
“We’re sitting here, eating real meat tacos, drinking piña coladas, watching Jupitero pass by,” she said, throwing me a sour look. “And you’re thinking philosophical thoughts about war?”
“Guess it’s kind of silly,” I answered. I swallowed a bite and held up one of the half-full tortillas. “You really think these are real shrimp tacos?”
“Yeah, I can always taste it when they’re synthetic.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You want to argue about that now? Come on, Avery,” she said.
“Sorry. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing toward the largest planet in the Purvas system.
“Yes. My favorite planet after Saturn.”
I took another bite and chewed pensively. “Have you decided where we’re going to take our R&R?”
“It’s your decision, too,” she said.
“If you…you’re right. If you’re asking me, I’d like to go to a beach. Beyond that, I’m not picky.”
“I think there’s a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific.”
“Mauiation?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
I shook my head. “Gone.”
“Really?”
“Completely. The Teds didn’t stop at leveling everything. They didn’t leave much beyond a few atolls. No fresh water and a lot of sharks. We’d be better off going to Southern Calitown. We can surf, gamble, and I’ve heard they’ve got a new amusement park.”
“A new amusement park…in the middle of a war?”
“I thought you didn’t want to discuss politics.”
“Yeah. I don’t. But building roller coasters while people die?”
I shrugged. “It’s a tourist town.”
Her brow furrowed. “Not if someone drops a P48.”
“Exactly why they’re banned on both sides.”
“So people can still ride roller coasters?”
“Of course. And eat shrimp tacos, and consume and produce to fund the effort,” I said, taking another bite. “Let’s agree to start our vacation time early and not discuss the war, politics, or cross-species civil rights.”
“Can we still discuss sex?”
“Always.”
“Good. You’re going to need your strength. Finish your dinner.”
It was another three weeks until the ship received clearance to leap, and we held true to our agreement to keep our conversations noncontroversial. By the time we received a leap time, I needed a vacation from my vacation. Callie was an enthusiastic lover.
A disembodied robotic voice drifted from hidden speakers, the tone calibrated to soothe while still commanding attention. “All passengers must report to their assigned shelves by eighteen hundred, ship’s clock. Orinasa and all associated corporations and subvendors will not be liable for the deaths of passengers not properly stored prior to leap. You are responsible for ensuring your own equipment is properly calibrated and in working order prior to nineteen hundred. Any requests for service after nineteen hundred will not be honored. Have a nice sleep, and thank you for leaping with Orinasa and our partners.”
I stored my belongings and found my assigned drawer. The stainless steel units reminded me of a morgue I’d seen in an old film. The front was rectangular and highly polished, with a small input screen. I entered my personal information, verified it was really me with an assigned code I’d almost forgotten, and waited until the drawer slid out so I could climb inside.
“Good night!” Callie shouted from across the vault.
“Sleep well,” I answered. I stepped inside, lay down, and punched in another set of codes on the internal input screen. After receiving a clearance authorization, I stuck the two-way monitor-chem needle into my arm, clamped it down, and listened to the machine beep a few times.
Success.
The unit moved back into the wall, plunging me into complete darkness and silence. Warm sleep juice seeped into my arm, and leap gel filled the drawer. Scientists and doctors claim that dreams don’t occur during leaps, but I swear that I dreamt of chemical labs, human experiments, and freezing to death in a state of loneliness and despair.
We arrived in the solar system, forty-five AU away from the sun, somewhere between the mean orbits of Eris and Pluto – in other words, far enough from Earth not to cause any problems if the Belkinotic drive acted up, terrorists were waiting for us, or a Vertonicist anomaly occurred.
Callie had breakfast delivered to our room soon after she quit vomiting.
The Guritains had entered our solar system much the same way we just had, eighty years ago. The year my grandfather was born.
The Northern Hemisphere’s summer in the year 2221 CE was brutally hot, while the Southern Hemisphere was seeing record cold temperatures. It was as if the Earth had caught the flu, and the bug had collectively driven humanity insane. The Federation of Chinese States continuously denied reports of massive starvation and temperature-related deaths, but reliable estimates put the number of casualties in Indonesia alone at seven million people just in the month of July. The American Wars had been escalating for a decade, but in that year seventy million people perished as a direct result of heat and drought.
The European Union had fallen to Russia during the American Wars, a predictable outcome after the EU moved a hundred million troops into Brazil a month before the Russians marched west, taking everything from Finland to Portugal under their wing. The many reports of Russian atrocities were so outrageous that most scholars today deny them, but I’ve seen a few documentaries, and it seems hard to ignore the evidence.
Famine and drought were so common in Africa and India that unless a million people perished in a single food riot or an exceptionally dangerous disease broke out and threatened troop movements, the rest of the world’s media barely paid attention. I’ve seen references to rebellions with casualties topping five million that were mere footnotes in larger histories, where it required twen
ty million deaths for the authors to call an offensive movement a battle.
The United Earth Council declared that human population had surpassed the thirty-five billion mark sometime during the year 2200, but a mere twenty-one years later, as my grandfather’s first scream announced to the universe another hungry mouth to feed, the population had already dipped below twenty billion. Famine, drought, pestilence, and war had been hard at work. I once read the Bible narrative called Revelations in a pre-college comparative religion class, so I completely understand why billions of Christians believed the rapture was imminent when the first starship appeared just outside the solar system.
It wasn’t Jesus Christ who set foot on terra incognito, but rather one Captain Veersaltious, Guritain explorer, conqueror, and statesman. Within a decade of his arrival, the population of Earth had dropped to barely eight billion.
By a quirk in the universe’s sense of humor, Callie and I arrived in Mexico City during the weeklong celebration of Captain Veersaltious’s discovery of Earth, so our appointments to check in with Command Operations, Joint Armed Forces, Guritain Army, Mexico City, Guritainistan, were delayed several days – as would be expected by anyone who’s ever visited Earth’s most populous metropolis.
The day of our appointment to check in with a Major Vistagon arrived, and being good soldiers, we showed up an hour early.
“You think we’d be safe to travel to Southern Africa?” Callie asked as she browsed through travel brochures handed to her by an overly helpful private who couldn’t stop thanking us for our service and dedication to freedom.
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
The private nodded. “Most actions are currently being executed in the occupied Russian Union, as well as in Talteruck, Samalifant, and I think West Ovpertof. I can check for you if you’d like.”
“Yes, please.” Callie placed the brochure back on the private’s desk. “If you think it’s safe, I want to go there. They have a zoo with dozens of rare animals. The last known mating pair of tigers just had a litter. It would be fun.”
“Then it’s settled,” I said. “But I’m surprised after our little adventure you want to go observe fur-covered carnivores.”