Transmission Lost

by Stefan Mazzara

  “As far as the second thing goes? You're gonna bleep this out, but fuck those guys. I can see where they're coming from, yeah. I used to be like them. Hell, I think we all were at some point, and sure, we had good reason to think that way. Nobody is arguing that first contact was handled well, on either side.” Jack leaned forward in his seat. “But for the most part, we're all alike, you know? There are terrible humans out there, too. We've seen that these past few years, with some folks that I think we can truly call traitors. But I think the good should outweigh the bad. Our differences are cultural, not moral. As humans, we see slavery as inherently bad, but there was a time on Earth when it was all the rage. That's changing in the Ascendancy, now. Think about that. They're setting aside something that's been a part of their culture for thousands of years because they see the value in letting it go. I think that, as humans, we can set aside a fifteen-year grudge to get something good out of it.” He sat back again, crossing his legs. “So, no, I think if anyone is betraying our race, it's those people who refuse to see reason and acknowledge past errors.”

  “So you think our similarities with Ailians should be enough to cancel out the early days of the war? Thousands of colonists were killed or enslaved in those first border conflicts, after all, before we even were sure of what was out there.”

  Jack shook his head. “Don't get me wrong. Nothing will ever cancel out the hurt and pain that was experienced when this all started. But again, let's think about what's happened more recently.” He laid a hand out with his palm open as he continued. “We've all been in the same boat. Both of our peoples were attacked from within. We both lost our homeworlds. Okay, yes, Lirna was under rebel control for barely more than a month, and we've only just now been able to retake Earth, but we still have a shared experience. It was shared experience that let me move past my own misgivings and prejudice. I think a lot of humans see it the same way, now. That's what we should get out of this, and it's the best right that can come of so much wrong. Especially when you consider that the whole rebellion was ultimately a proxy war on the part of the Pteryd.” He let himself smile again. “We can't make the pain go away forever, but I think we can, all together, turn it into something productive.”

  “I see,” the interviewer said. “Well, you do have a unique perspective on things, certainly. And certainly you've been an outspoken supporter of the alliance since your return to human space. One question that I'm sure is on our viewers' minds right now: The Ailian you spent so much time with during your time in the Ascendancy, Aria. Have you ever spoken with her since leaving, or has she ever tried to contact you?”

  That question left Jack quiet for a while. When he finally spoke again, his voice was much softer than before. “Have we spoken? No. Has she ever tried to contact me? I'm not sure. I don't know that any attempt to contact me would have been successful. Communication lines throughout the war have been shaky, at best. Still are. And she is, or at least I assume she is, still in their military, in an elite unit. I've certainly tried to contact her, but finding the means to do so is extremely difficult. I'm certain she's tried to do the same, but I came here because of her wishes for my own safety, because of who she is. I know she wouldn't try to reach me if she thought it would put me in danger. I have to believe that if she hasn't been contacting me, it's because she's looking out for my best interests.” He grimaced. “A lot of us have relatives, friends, or acquaintances in the military. I'm lucky in that I have my sister, who's stationed here on Cerelis now. But not everyone is that lucky. Thousands of families have to go months or even years without hearing from their loved ones. That's the definition of strength right there, isn't it? To be able to withstand the worry and stress of not knowing?”

  “Forgive me for saying so, but for all you know, she could be dead. Killed in action.”

  Jack resisted the urge to stand up and punch the guy in the face. “I...suppose that's true. I try not to think about that. Some days are harder than others, but I try to stay optimistic. I'm sure there are families all across your viewing audience who are dealing with similar things.”

  “Indeed, that's something that we can all understand and appreciate.” The reporter shuffled his stack of notecards. “One final point. With the recent victories on Earth and in the Outer Colonies of the Ascendancy, military and political leaders have announced that the Pteryd appear to have begun their final retreat, and that the war is officially coming to an end, some news that I think everyone has been rejoicing over these last few weeks. They've also announced that human, Ailian, and Nuretan representatives will be coming together on Earth in a few days for a formal ceremony, in a symbolic handing-over of the planet back to humanity, with talks planned that should put in place permanent treaties of alliance.”

  Jack nodded. “I'm aware of that. I think it's a great step in the healing process.”

  “Rumor has it that you've been offered an invitation to that ceremony, considering that you were the first human to return from the Ascendancy, and also in light of your contributions to public discussion on human-Ailian relations. No pun intended, certainly. Can you comment on that?”

  He chuckled politely, even though the joke had been pretty ill-made. “I wouldn't say I was the first. More like one of the first.” Jack cleared his throat. “But, uh, yeah. I was invited. I suppose I'll go. I'm as eager to see Earth as anyone else, and it is a real honor to be invited.”

  “Well, we hope to see you there. Thank you for your time today, Mr. Squier.” The reporter turned in his seat to face the camera. “And thank you all for joining us this evening. My guest has been retired Lieutenant Jonathan Squier, a former pilot with the United Nations Navy and a former prisoner of war. His new book is In the Den of the Enemy: My Time in the Ascendancy, available now in bookstores. Good night, and thanks for watching.”

  ******

  Jack heaved a weary sigh as soon as he walked in the front door of his apartment. He was relieved to be home, since it had been quite the long day for him. He'd been up early in the morning for a meeting with his publisher, and then it had been off to work for a few hours before going in for his television interview. Ever since arriving on Cerelis, he'd gotten back to the kind of work that he knew, though he kept a lot closer to home now than he had before. He was a cargo pilot yet again, though now he restricted himself to planetary shipments only. As much as he still loved space travel, he had learned quite the lesson about what could happen, especially during a time of open war. Luckily for him, he didn't really have to do that kind of work anymore. Since he had never formally been fired by the company he'd previously worked for, he had come home to several months of back pay at the hazardous-duty rate, which had left him with quite a tidy sum of money, enough to buy a handsome apartment in the capital of Cerelis. Along with the money he was now about to receive as the result of completing his memoirs, he was in a comfortable situation, but he wouldn't have felt right about not working, so he still hauled freight every now and then to keep busy.

  Though he really desired to be living someplace else, Jack had to admit that Cerelis wasn't bad at all. The planet was basically the same as Earth, as far as size and climate went, though it was much more heavily-populated that it once had been on account of the influx of refugees because of the war. As the headquarters of the United Nations, it was also the most important planet in human space, especially while Earth had been in rebel hands. That made for lots of interesting news and there was always something exciting going on. Since Cerelis was a lot deeper in human space than Earth, the war had fortunately been kept away for the most part, which Jack was just fine with. He'd seen enough of that to last him a lifetime. He liked staying on Cerelis, all things considered.

  Another plus of living on Cerelis was that it had allowed him to reconnect with his family, a relationship that he had allowed to lag in the wake of his retirement from the military. Upon getting settled in his new life, he'd made the decision to seek out his parents and siblings. Prior to leaving on that ill-fat
ed cargo run, his mother and father had been living on Earth, his brother on Mars, and his sister had been in the UN Navy. He'd found his sister, Penny, almost immediately. In the aftermath of the loss of Earth and the retreat of their military forces, she'd found her way to an assignment on Cerelis, which was where Jack and she had reunited shortly after his arrival. She'd given him the news that his parents had made it off and were refugees on another planet, and they'd come to Cerelis once they'd heard he was safe there. Bad news had come in the form of being informed that his brother had been killed when the rebels had taken over the rest of the Sol system. He'd been an executive with a mining company on Mars, and hadn't survived the bombardment that rebel forces had subjected that planet to. In all, though, he was glad to have been able to come back together with most of his family. And, for him, that family included another member now.

  “I'm home!” he called as he closed the door behind him. Jack walked into the living room of his apartment, looking around. Even after five years, the place still seemed kind of new to him. His Cerelan abode was not at all like where he had lived during his time on Lirna. Instead of sandy stone, the walls were made of clean, white-painted wood, and the floors were short, soft carpet instead of smooth rock.

  “Hey!” a voice answered him. Jack looked to a couch in the living room, where the speaker was seated. A smiling face was beaming at him. She was dark-skinned, black-haired, and emerald-eyed, and had been watching television when he came in. In the time that they had been together, his adopted daughter Brooke had grown into just as beautiful a young woman as he had suspected she would when he'd met her. The former slave looked almost nothing like the tired, beaten-down girl that he had first known. She had just turned eighteen, or near enough. They had never been able to figure out what her exact birthday was, but had settled on the day they'd arrived on Cerelis as a satisfactory date to use.

  Jack hadn't intended on adopting Brooke at first. He'd told her that once they returned to human space, they'd work together on reuniting her with her real family, or at least finding out where they were for an eventual reunion. But over the months, it became clear that records of where she was born or who her parents were just didn't exist, so after the first year he decided that he was as close to a father as she could ever hope for. That had been fine with her, so he had taken the formal steps of adopting her, and since then had raised her like she was his real daughter.

  “Hey,” Jack said, taking a seat on the couch next to her. “How was your day? School go alright?” Needless to say, Brooke had been way behind in formal schooling owing to her early life, but she had proven to be very smart and dedicated, and had caught up faster than he would have thought possible. Now she was on track to graduate high school along with other teens her approximate age. College had been an idea they'd both talked about, but Brooke had expressed a desire to follow in his footsteps and become a pilot. She wanted to join the Navy and fly fighters or helicopters, and Jack was behind her all the way. He wasn't about to tell her what she could and couldn't do. She'd had enough of her life dictated to her already.

  “School was fine, daddy,” Brooke said. He still got a little thrill when she called him that. He would have been just fine if she'd continued calling him “Jack” for the rest of his life, but “daddy” had a nice ring to it that he never would have anticipated. “Seems crazy that finals are only a few months away. I never thought I'd ever get to go to school, much less graduate.”

  “I know.” Jack reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “I'm proud of you, you know? You've done good. Real good.”

  “All thanks to you.” Brooke smiled at him, then looked back to the television. “I was watching your interview on TV, daddy. That reporter was an idiot, asking you all those dumb questions at the end.”

  Jack snorted with laughter. “Yeah...Yeah, I'm used to it by now. They're just looking for the dramatic angle. Hopefully that was the last interview I have to do for a while.”

  “That's not really the title of your book, is it?”

  He looked up at the ceiling with a sigh. “The publisher thought it had a better ring to it than the title I wanted. I was going to call it Final Flight, or something less...I dunno...less cheesy. But the publisher thought that title didn't has as much punch.” He chuckled. “I didn't even really write it for anyone in particular. Just...something I felt like writing, I guess. I needed to tell my story.”

  “Can't wait to read it,” Brooke said. She looked over at him. “You don't talk a lot about the stuff that happened back then. Stuff I wasn't around for, anyway.”

  “Yeah. Some of it's pretty painful to think about.” Jack took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Bad memories...Good memories that make me feel bad...” He slumped a little and closed his eyes. “It's a lot to keep inside. I guess that's why I wrote the book. Easier than talking about it.”

  The two of them were quiet for a while, and the only sounds in the living room were the noises from the television. The news had just ended, and now there was some special-interest show going on about some crazy fad diet that a celebrity was promoting. Something about Ailian tea being the secret to longevity. Jack wasn't really paying attention to it. He was lost in thought. Talking about the book had dredged up a lot of memories, and a lot of thoughts about the ceremony he was supposed to be attending on Earth. He wasn't sure he really wanted to go. He knew what to expect: a bunch of politicians, ambassadors, military officers, and celebrities talking about how this was a turning point for the whole of populated space. There would be representatives from every major world in the colonized galaxies, from each of the three newly-allied species. As much as Jack agreed with and was enthusiastic about the need for such showings of cooperation and friendship, he just didn't want to have to face it. Seeing Ailians in person again would make him think about Aria.

  Jack thought about the last time he had seen her. He remembered it like it had been only a few days ago. He'd never forget the frenzied terror of escaping the royal palace on Lirna with Brooke, and then seeing Aria being brought out on a stretcher, her dye-blackened fur matted and stained with blood. She had looked near to death. They had shared a few words, one last kiss, and then she had made him leave. Neither of them had wanted it, but both of them had known it was to keep him safe. As long as the rebellion was going on, she would be a target for retribution because she killed the rebel leader, her own mother. As long as Jack was with her, that would make him a target as well, and an easier one to get to. Jack would have been in constant danger, and Aria would have been in constant danger from trying to protect him. Returning as deep into human space as Cerelis put him far enough away from the rebellion that his safety was as good as guaranteed, and one less thing for Aria to fret over. But that didn't make the pain and worry of being separated from her any better. He hoped that she had made it through the war alright and was still alive, but...the fact that he hadn't heard even a whisper from her made him fearful, and angry, and about a million other emotions that all collided to make him feel absolutely miserable.

  “Why are you so quiet, daddy?”

  Jack gave a start and opened his eyes again, turning his head to the side to see Brooke watching him. His daughter looked concerned, something that he had seen in her face too many times over the last five years. He often went into quiet moods like that. Never anything sour or brooding, just melancholic, but it was certainly understandable that she'd be worried about him.

  “Just...thinking,” Jack said. “I'm okay, it's just...”

  “You're thinking about her again.” This was a statement, not a question. Brooke knew very well how close he and Aria had been, and had known for some time, now. When she and Jack had first met, he had described Aria just as a good friend, but of course when the deceased Empress, Kri'a Solan IV, had used his and Aria's relationship as a tool to help rally support for an alliance with humanity, very few people on Lirna and in many other places in the Ascendancy had not heard of them. Brooke, as a general rule, was not ver
y fond of Ailians, owing to her life as a slave, but she had liked both Empress Solan and her successor, Li'ren Amani. She was sympathetic on some level to how her father felt.

  “Yeah...,” Jack admitted. He sat up on the couch, leaning forward with his hands clasped over his knees. “I probably seem like a moron for dwelling on it so much. Five years have gone by. I haven't heard from her at all.”

  Brooke scooted over a little and put a hand on her father's knee. “You're not a moron,” she assured him. “I think about my parents every day. I only have fuzzy memories, but it's still there. And I haven't seen them in fifteen years or more.” She squeezed his knee. “I'm sure you'll...get to see her again, someday.”

  “Sometimes I'm not so sure,” Jack muttered. “I feel like I would have heard from her by now. I get dark thoughts, sometimes. Maybe she just forgot about me. We didn't know each other that long, after all...She could have moved on, found someone else...Or hell, maybe she's dead, like the reporter said.”

  “You don't really believe that,” Brooke said immediately. She put an arm around his shoulders. “You don't believe it for a minute.”

  Jack was quiet again for a few seconds, then finally he gave a weak smile. “No...Not really...But still.” He chuckled a little. “But it's easier for me to think that. How fucked up is that? That it's easier for me to believe she's dead than to believe anything else?”

  “Pretty fucked up,” Brooke said, smiling as well. The smile went away quickly as she hugged him. “It just means you still love her a lot, that's all. It's just your head trying to get some closure for you. It doesn't make you a moron, or a bad person, or anything bad at all. It just makes you a regular person who doesn't know anything for sure.”

  He hugged his daughter. “You're a pretty smart lady, kiddo,” he said. “Guess I got at least one thing in my life going right for me. I couldn't have found a better daughter if I'd made one myself.”