Origins: A Greater Good

by Mark Henrikson

  “Neither. We terminated Tomal’s life force while the Nexus device was offline.”

  A unified gasp from the audience accompanied the magistrate’s question as he drew his head back with eyes open wide in surprise, “That requires an explanation.”

  Valnor released a deep, contemplative sigh before answering, “Tomal was always a difficult individual to handle. His engineering genius was only surpassed by his arrogance and ambition. Often it got the better of him. One time in particular, his self-centered tendencies made him an unwitting accomplice to further the plans of Goron, the Alpha leader who also crashed on the planet with my crew.”

  “Tomal was difficult, but the captain always managed to find an effective way to manage him until a disease specific to human physiology changed everything. A condition known as Alzheimer’s degraded his mental faculties near the end of one particular life cycle, eroding his impulse controls. He saw conspiracies against him everywhere, and attributed many of them to Captain Hastelloy or other members of the crew.”

  “Did this condition not remedy itself when his life force passed on to a new form using the Nexus?” the magistrate inquired.

  “No, the damage was done and only got worse with every passing lifetime. The impulses and conspiracy theories lingered in his thought process like a phantom, haunting his existence.”

  “His paranoia ultimately led Tomal to issue orders to murder tens of millions of humans that he thought were following a conspiracy concocted by the captain: not just murder, torture, starvation, and experimentation. This genocide was the most barbaric act of pure evil I, or any of us, have ever witnessed.”

  “Given his actions and the complete impossibility of him ever getting better, we decided the only just course of action was to end Tomal’s existence.”

  “We? Who is we?” the magistrate insisted.

  “All four of us,” Valnor answered without a hint of regret in his voice. “The vote had to be unanimous or else we would have simply left him in the Nexus until returning to Novus. As it turned out, the vote was unanimous.”

  Chancellor Malum did not look happy with the blame for Tomal’s ‘murder’ being spread among the entire Lazarus crew, so he moved to clarify, “Who gave the order to take the Nexus offline?”

  “Captain Hastelloy.”

  “Who discharged the weapon that killed your fellow crewman?”

  “Captain Hastelloy,” Valnor responded.

  Upon hearing the two answers along with the clamor of shock and excitement from the audience, Chancellor Malum settled back into the plush cushions of his chair with a satisfied smirk. The magistrate put an end to the commotion with three successive strikes with his black orb.

  “I’ve heard enough regarding the murder of crewman Tomal,” the magistrate declared. “I will now hear testimony regarding the final charge of treason committed by Captain Hastelloy against the Republic. Captain Valnor, please tell this court what happened when the confiscated battle cruiser arrived at its final destination, the end of this long string of space fold points that Captain Hastelloy ordered.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Valnor answered with a glint of resentment in his eye directed toward Hastelloy.

  Chapter 23: Toeing the Line

  Valnor found it quite difficult to focus his thoughts as he made his way down the ship’s corridor. The fact that he needed to bend in half at the waist to fit through the five-foot tall hallway was certainly distracting, but the real reason was his concern regarding what this meeting was about. It was a convocation of the senior staff without Captain Hastelloy, and that never, ever happened. Gallono would never dream of going behind the captain’s back, but what other reasoning could there be for him to organize this gathering away from the captain?

  All speculation came to an abrupt end when he reached the door barring entry to his destination. He tapped a rectangular button on the wall resulting in a gentle chime emanating from inside the room. A moment later the door slid to the side and revealed Commander Gallono squatting low in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. “It’s about time. Get in here you’re late.”

  Gallono scooted to the side and took a seat on the lower tier of a bunk bed along the right hand side of the room. The upper tier mattress had been folded up and into the wall to provide adequate headroom. Seated on the lower bunk across a narrow aisle from the commander sat Tonwen, with the upper deck mattress retracted in a similar fashion.

  The accommodation’s design allowed the room to house four Novi crewmen, but now served as Gallono’s quarters. The tiny chamber barely served the converted purpose, but had absolutely no business trying to fit three human bodies into the tiny confines.

  Valnor ducked through the low doorway and attempted a long stride over the top of Tonwen and Gallono’s entangled legs in the aisle, but failed in the attempt. Just when he began shifting his weight forward into the stride, his leading toe caught Gallono’s shin. This sent Valnor careening into the pint-sized quarters to have his forward momentum stopped by smashing headfirst into the far wall.

  He instinctively set his feet under him and tried to stand up, but only succeeded in banging his head a second time against the ceiling. The two blows dizzied Valnor to the point that he lost his balance and collapsed down onto the cot next to Tonwen where the back wall proved equally unaccommodating to his skull.

  “I have seen better landings,” Tonwen commented while applying a hand to the back of Valnor’s neck for a sympathetic massage.

  “Especially from our superstar pilot,” Gallono added.

  “Pilots are accustomed to maneuvering out in the open,” Valnor protested while looking around the room in disgust. “Confine him to cramped quarters and this is what you get. Now before I pass out, would you mind telling me why we’re all here in these illustrious surroundings without the captain?”

  “The captain’s busy,” Gallono answered, almost as a deflection.

  “Nooooo, you don’t say,” Valnor said in a deep, husky voice. “It’s not like he picked a fight with the entire Novi Republic the moment we reestablished contact; this after we spent thousands of years struggling to make that contact. Oh wait, that’s exactly what he did.”

  “And that attitude would be why the three of us are having this conversation right now,” Gallono interrupted before Valnor could hit his true sarcastic stride. “Each of us has followed the captain’s orders through thick and thin, whether we agreed with them at the time or not, to see everything come out for the better in the end. Time and again he has worked his magic, but this time feels different.”

  Gallono leaned forward in his bunk to bring his hands to a hover just above Tonwen and Valnor’s knees. “I think we all owe it to ourselves and each other to talk this one through before it goes much farther. None of us would dare question the captain’s decisions with him in the room. That is why he’s not here. I want your candid opinions.”

  “Well, I believe we can all agree that the defense of Earth was completely justified,” Tonwen offered up for debate.

  Gallono nodded his head in agreement. “Billions of human lives were at stake even though they posed no threat to the Novi. I don’t think there was any real choice in the matter.”

  “Oh yes there was,” Valnor challenged, earning himself two sets of disbelieving stares in doing so. He immediately threw his arms up in a diplomatic show of surrender. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but was the captain really justified in defending Earth from the Novi?”

  “Billions of lives saved, enough said,” Gallono snapped.

  “Human lives,” Valnor amended. “We’ve all seen Captain Hastelloy set into motion plans that left humans dead in the end, sometimes millions of them.”

  The doubting looks from his fellow crewmen gave Valnor cause to list the highlights. “What about China back in the middle ages? He sabotaged a dam that flooded half the country and killed at least a million people. He provoked World War I, which of course begot the Second World War not
long after. The body count from executing his plans has been massive, by any measure, during our time on Earth.”

  “If he hadn’t done those things, then the Alpha would have won. They would have conquered or destroyed the entire planet. Billions of lives were saved by sacrificing the relative few,” Gallono insisted.

  Valnor contemplated the retort for a moment, but dismissed the line of thinking with a shake of his head. “In my view, all of that was done, first and foremost, to preserve the lives trapped inside the Nexus; Novi lives. The Alpha had to be defeated at all cost, and preserving humanity during that struggle was simply an ethical and convenient byproduct.”

  Now it was Valnor’s turn to sit up straight to accentuate his point. “When the captain attacked the Novi in defense of Earth, he took Novi lives. He flung a fully crewed ship into the sun; a ship, by the way, that was sent here to rescue us. He ordered me to crush an escape pod with Novi inside as a show of force. Why the change in thinking? Why are human lives suddenly more valuable than Novi lives to him, and by extension to us?”

  Valnor stopped there, sensing from his audience that his lobbying the opposite opinion may have gone too far. Still, the words needed saying and the questions needed asking.

  Gallono looked as if a heavyweight title bout was taking place inside his mind. He was loyal almost to a fault to Captain Hastelloy, but was also smart enough to know Valnor’s arguments had merit.

  Tonwen finally broke the silence. “The premise of your argument is built upon the idea that everything we did since landing on Earth occurred to protect the lives inside the Nexus. The Novi arrived to take the Nexus home; therefore, there was no threat to the Nexus and there was no need to take defensive measures.”

  “That is where my thought process keeps landing,” Valnor confirmed.

  “What about the captain’s adherence to the non-interference directive? It would have been much easier to bring everyone out of the Nexus, take over the planet, and get home in a few years. He kept to the directive in order for all four pans of humanities Neo Scale to remain in balance, which had nothing to do with protecting the Nexus.”

  “The captain had us develop and distribute a cure for the Black Death plague when the Alpha unleashed their bioweapon on the planet,” Gallono added. “If anything, the plague would have culled the herd of Goron’s potential followers since he had all but taken over Christianity at that time. Again, that was done more to preserve the humans and their thriving civilization than just protecting the Nexus.”

  All of a sudden Gallono made a fist with his right hand and punched the palm of his left to produce an ear-piercing slap. “Then the Novi arrive with orders to destroy all of it. What they tried to do was unconscionable. It was pure evil along the lines of Tomal at the end of World War II, and that kind of evil must be opposed.”

  “Fair point,” Valnor conceded as he leaned back against the wall to distance himself physically from the argumentative position he had taken moments before. “What about sharing technology with the humans? That is expressly forbidden in the directives the captain fought so valiantly to preserve through the years.”

  “He may have bent the individual rules a bit, but it was done to maintain the integrity of the overall non-interference directive,” Gallono countered. “Without the gravity weapon and the ability to use it, Earth would have been turned into a smoldering pile of ash the moment we left orbit.”

  Gallono gestured with an open palm toward Tonwen. “You have been our resident culture cop since we landed on Earth. Do you disagree with handing over the gravity weapon for an extremely secretive, tiny, and unaffiliated organization to administer on behalf of that planet?”

  “No, I do not,” Tonwen answered after only a brief contemplative pause. “I am complicit in the captain’s actions up to this point. That said, now that we are away from Earth the question must be asked: what now?”

  “Now we finish the remaining space folds that the captain ordered us to execute,” Gallono responded in a matter of fact tone.

  Valnor shook his head and let out a noise that resonated somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “Then what? What is waiting for us at the end of this wild goose chase he has us all on? Do either of you know what the captain’s plan is or what the end game of this little revolution of his looks like? Because I haven’t seen or heard a peep from the captain since I arrived on this ship.”

  Tonwen nodded his head in agreement. “My only sighting of the captain lately was when he stepped out of his office long enough to hand you the space fold orders, Commander. I have noticed that Captain Hastelloy is using the Flashtrans communicator extensively, almost non-stop, since we began the progression of space fold jumps. Do you know anything about that?”

  Gallono’s face tightened, looking very uneasy upon hearing that particular question put forth to him. The commander seemed to choose his words carefully as he answered, “I met with the captain in his office not long ago. All I can say is that I’m content to follow his lead on his current course of action. He’s in command and it’s our duty to follow his orders trusting that they are for the best. After all of these years, Captain Hastelloy has yet to let us down; that is reason enough for me.”

  Tonwen seemed fine with the commander’s sentiment, but Valnor was not. “If the captain taught me one thing over all the years it is that I need to trust my own intuition and question authority if I feel the need. All this secrecy and floating around in an ethically gray void of serving versus fighting the Novi Republic feels off to me. I can’t blindly follow orders anymore, the captain taught me better than that.”

  “There is an ethical line for each of us that we will not cross,” Valnor went on. “Before all of this, I would have drawn that line at killing fellow Novi. Clearly, my personal line has moved and that scares me. That is how Hitler and Tomal were able to lead Germany down such a dark path, because they slowly, methodically moved everyone’s ethical boundary without them realizing it.”

  Valnor looked Gallono and Tonwen in the eyes before asking, “Where is the line that none of us will cross for him? If we haven’t reached it yet, we have got to be getting close.”

  Rather than jump down Valnor’s throat about insubordination, Gallono instead pointed to the door. “The captain has said on countless occasions that his door is always open. If you really feel this strongly about the situation, I suggest you avail yourself of his open door invitation. You know where the two of us stand on all of this; you need to get yourself there as well.”

  “I think I’ll do precisely that,” Valnor replied as he stepped over Gallono and Tonwen’s feet once more in an infinitely more graceful exit from the room than his entry.

  Before the door closed behind him, Valnor saw Tonwen moving to leave as well, but Gallono stopped him by saying, “Hold on Lieutenant, there’s something you and I still need to talk about.”

  All Valnor could do was shake his head as he made his way down the corridor heading for an awaiting lift carriage. It seemed that a state of secrecy existed all around him, and it was infuriating. First the captain and now it seemed Tonwen and Gallono as well.

  Valnor’s path took him past one of the ship’s many armories. He paused for a moment at the doorway before inputting his command code to gain entry. He was loath to do it, but Valnor decided that his best chance to learn what was really going on behind the captain’s closed door was to plant a listening device. To that end, he retrieved a covert piece of Novi technology from the armory and continued on his way.

  The lift ride to the bridge did nothing to alleviate his frustrations. If anything, the time spent waiting redoubled his need for answers, specific answers. There would be no more half-truths, evasive non-answers, or flat out secrets. He would have answers.

  Valnor’s frustration had reached a point that by the time he arrived at the captain’s office door alongside the bridge, he neglected to ring the door chime and barged right in.

  “I look forward to finally meeting you face to fac
e,” Hastelloy was saying to the Flashtrans communicator angled away from Valnor on the captain’s desk. The solid black plastic backing of the device hid the image of whomever the captain was speaking with, but a reflection off the window peering out into the darkness of space behind the captain’s desk gave a distorted reflection.

  The captain snapped his head away from the conversation and eyed Valnor with a measure of concern. He seemed to assess where his subordinate’s line of vision was focused, glanced behind his desk to confirm that the reflective window was a concern and moved fast to correct the situation.

  “Till then,” Hastelloy managed to utter before terminating the communication, rendering the screen dark.

  There was a long pause as the captain eyed Valnor from across the room, assessing his reaction to judge if Valnor had seen too much, and he most definitely had. The unmistakable image of an Alpha had occupied Captain Hastelloy’s Flashtrans monitor. An Alpha! Valnor pressed into service every lesson in emotional detachment and self-restraint he ever heard to contain his outraged reaction demanding to be set free.

  “Yes, Ensign, what is it?” the captain asked in a quiet, innocent voice.

  “We are about ready to make the final space fold in the series of maneuvers you ordered. You asked to be informed when that time came,” Valnor managed with a straight face. Turns out, he did not need the listening device after all, just good eyesight.

  “Thank you. I’ll be out shortly. Until then, hold our current position.” Observing a hesitation in his subordinate, Hastelloy added, “That will be all, Ensign.”

  The hell it will, Valnor said to himself on his way out of the captain’s office.

  Chapter 24: Trappings of Diplomacy

  Valnor sat at the navigator station on the bridge with his mind racing at the speed of light. There were Alpha still left in the galaxy? The captain had somehow managed to locate them? Not just find them, but was now talking on what appeared to be friendly terms with one of them?