by Mark Wandrey
That work was done. The Rangers were doing well, especially under Gregg, who was a skilled commander. There were six forts in strategic locations, each housing thousands of Rangers. Bellatrix would not be an easy nut to crack for any but the best of the higher-order species. Her War College was up and running as well, the product of a dream she’d had for some time.
What was left for her to accomplish as a Chosen? Couldn’t she do more as a civilian now? At a faculty function a month earlier, over drinks and finger food, Ted Hurt had suggested she run for a Tranquility Tribal Council opening coming up in the winter recess. Minu had laughed at the idea until she saw most of the staff agreeing with him. They thought having a former Chosen academic on the planetary ruling body would be a wonderful thing.
She’d quickly moved the conversation in a new direction, but she’d never quite forgotten that night. In fact, she’d sent out a few tentative emails and found a lot of the people she knew approved of the notion and were willing to support her with their bank accounts.
“Is it really such a crazy idea?” she wondered. She began mentally formulating her letter of resignation.
“Chosen Groves?”
Minu looked up to see a man in his sixties standing there, a groundskeeper’s uniform hanging from his gaunt frame, holding a rake in one hand. “Dean Groves is fine,” she said with a smile, “or just Minu. Can I help you?”
He pulled the floppy hat from his head and nervously rung it between his hands before putting it back on to protect his bald head from the deadly rays. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. I’ve seen you here from time to time and always wanted to talk to you.”
“You’re welcome to talk to me any time you want. I’m just a staff member, like you.” She shifted her focus to the man and away from the letter.
“No, no, no,” he said and shook his head. He had little hair left, only a halo-like wisp of white curls. His face was lined and tanned from a lifetime of working outdoors. But his eyes were a brilliant blue and carried more intelligence than many men she’d met. “Begging your pardon ma’am, but you’re not like me. I’m just an old man, but an old man with a family, thanks to your family.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said, confused.
“Thirty-five years ago, I worked for the Chosen as a botanist. I wasn’t Chosen, but I had skills they didn’t, so I got to go off-world from time to time to help conduct research for the Tog. On my last mission, an alien species attacked us. Most of my team died. I and two other civilians hid in a dead city for two weeks, waiting to be found and killed. Then Chriso Alma showed up with a team of scouts and brought us home. He’d been searching for us the whole time. He risked his life and his team for three civilians.”
“That was my father,” she agreed, “but not me—”
“Please, let me finish? After I got home my wife and I finally had a child. We’d been trying for many years without luck. In time, our son had two children, but they were both born with a congenital birth defect; they would have been blind their whole lives. Then you sent back the codex from halfway across the galaxy, and inside was the cure. I cannot tell you the joy of having your grandchildren look at you for the first time.”
“I was just doing my job,” Minu said quietly. “My duty.”
“But you did it,” the old man smiled slightly, and his eyes glittered. “And I still have friends in the Chosen, so I know it was more than your duty. You went out there because you owed it to a friend.”
Minu nodded, her eyes tearing up, and she looked at the pure undiluted love the man radiated for her.
“Without the sacrifice of the Chosen, what would we be now?” he asked.
“Thank you,” was all she could manage. “You actually helped me a little.”
“Then I’m glad I bothered you. Now I have some azaleas to tend to.”
“Wait, what’s your name?”
“A.J. Richards. I doubt you’ve ever heard of me.”
The name tickled the back of Minu’s brain for a moment before she figured it out. “The son you had after my father rescued you was Alijah Richards, wasn’t it?”
He smiled again, though not as happily this time. With a single nod, he pushed his garden cart toward a nearby flowerbed.
The plants, along with all the others on the quad, were impeccable. As the aged botanist shambled away, Minu looked back down at her tablet and the letter she’d been writing. In her mind’s eye she saw her fireplace mantel in hers and Aaron’s little cabin. The face of Alijah Richards was one of the more prominent ones that floated in the hologram there. He’d died in the opening barrage of the Rasa Vendetta more than a decade ago.
“Nope,” she said to the cool afternoon and deleted the letter. “I won’t give them the satisfaction.” A smile cut across her angular face as she shook her head. Politics would have to wait. She still had things to finish as a Chosen.
* * *
“Why are you pushing this so hard now?” Pip asked.
Minu looked up from the series of wall screens flashing data down from space and sighed. “Isn’t the Tog reaction and spotting one of their ships snooping in our system reason enough?”
“Not really.” Minu wished she’d been in space working with Pip aboard the Kaatan, but that hadn’t been practical. You couldn’t just snap your fingers and get a ride to orbit, at least not yet. And she was once again officially on the First Among the Chosen’s shit list. Better to keep low for a while.
Aaron was cooking something that smelled like lamb fajitas from the kitchen of their cabin while she worked in the bedroom that now did double duty as an office. “We’ve known the universe was full of lies since we learned to open our eyes and look around.”
“I know you dragged me to the mystery kicking and screaming, you don’t have to rub my face in it.”
“Not quite kicking and screaming,” he said from thousands of kilometers above her in orbit.
“Thanks for the bone. So regardless, we’ve been behind the curve too damned long, especially since Lilith is sitting on a vast repository of knowledge, and we don’t know how to read most of it because of a missing language connection.”
On the video link screen, Pip was shrugging and staring at a monitor near his head. He was enjoying the zero gravity of the workroom set up for him by Lilith in the bowels of the Kaatan, but it was obvious from his complaining that his time in space was rapidly becoming annoying.
“I have been teaching Pip the language of The People.”
Minu looked at one of the side displays where Lilith had suddenly appeared. As usual her sharply angular features held no emotions. “Didn’t we both suggest that to him years ago?”
“Yes, you did,” Pip interjected, “but I’m finally getting tired of this game and figure I can speed up the project considerably if I pick up the damned language. Of course, that was before I started getting stuck on some of the phonetic elements.”
“Why?” Minu wondered. “Can’t be as hard as learning Peninsula.”
“Languages aren’t something we Chosen waste much time on,” Pip replied tersely. “Why bother when you have translators? English has been the default language of the Chosen since their inception. Most tribes around the world use it as well. On old Earth, the nation states had pride in their own language. Here, the Chosen have driven English home so heavily that linguistics is almost a dead art.”
“Okay, but since The People were hominids, the language can’t be like talking to an insect or something equally outlandish, right?”
“How should I know? Again, the damn translators do all the work. These People had some obvious differences in the shapes of their mouths. Some of the sounds are really hard for us.”
“So, if this species was around in the beginning, how come the translators don’t have a matrix for their language? Isn’t that like coming to Bellatrix and finding none of the signs written in English?”
“It is strange,” Lilith agreed. “At some point, their language matri
x was deleted from the database. My computer records are very old. Pip confirmed this when he compared the navigational data with current star positions. The data predates the establishment of a widespread translation matrix.”
“Why do you think?” Minu asked.
“There weren’t many species around.” She glanced at Pip who, as usual, looked confident in his knowledge.
“But, you said that part of the problem is too many species in the index.”
“Define too many. I’ve identified a hundred in Lilith’s database.”
“That’s quite a few.”
“Not compared to the three thousand, six hundred, ninety-eight identified in the current Concordia records. Or the eight thousand, one hundred twelve that my research shows as a record high.”
“Damn,” Minu whistled. “Is that number going up or down?”
“Down,” Pip replied without looking up. “It hasn’t gone up in the records.”
“How is that possible?”
“The oldest records are limited because the database purged itself, like we discovered with the self-destructing data storage chips. There are partial records that are a couple million years old, which is where I found the high-water mark.”
Which means that number might not even be the largest, Minu thought before speaking again. “Has it ever gone up or has the decline been steady?”
This time he didn’t have an immediate answer. His eyes glazed over for a second, and she knew he was using his link to access the computers. “Yes,” he said after almost a minute, “it has gone up. With decreasing regularity, there have been brief periods of increase that last from a few decades to several centuries. There have also been intermittent times of stability with almost no decrease in species density.”
“Fun side project for you,” she said. Pip snorted but listened. “Run those ups and downs through that massive brain of yours and see if you can find any sort of pattern or correlation, something that precipitated the temporary increases, anything.”
“You never ask too much, do you?”
“Sarcasm, did you just invent that?” He made an offhanded comment she didn’t catch because she was digging around looking for a data chip. “I have some data here I wanted you to try and find…” she said so he wouldn’t think she’d left.
“And here I thought you were hiding from my superior intellect.”
“No chance of that, Khan.” This time his laugh was genuine. “Aaron, where did you put my bag?”
“Closet,” he yelled back from the kitchen. “You dumped it by the door after you came in from your run.” The scorn in his voice was evident, even over the sounds of cooking, but he’d known she wasn’t much of a housekeeper when he married her.
“Be right back,” she said and went to the closet. In the main room, the smell of lamb fajitas was almost overpowering. Saliva flooded her mouth, and her stomach grumbled, reminding her it had been hours since lunch. “Almost ready?” she asked as she opened the closet.
“Ten minutes,” he replied. “I just put a bottle of mead in the chiller.”
“Awesome.” In the closet was her field bag, not the shoulder bag she took to school and back. She opened her mouth to complain that it was the wrong bag, when she realized it was her old field bag. Aaron had been cleaning recently and must have mistaken it for her current one. They were similar in appearance. The difference was the contents.
Without comment she picked up the bag and took it into the bedroom. Pip watched her from space as she set it on the desk and pulled out equipment. Sensors, field rations (well past expiration), the big bore semi-auto pistol Aaron and Gregg had designed, with extra magazines. Everything was still there from years ago when they’d gone to the far reaches of the galaxy to save Pip. She’d dropped the bag in the back of the bedroom closet and hadn’t touched it since. It was the last time she’d been on a field mission for the Chosen. Jacob had seen to that.
She spent a few minutes checking out things in the pack, even noting a small bloodstain on the strap and the worn Velcro latches. How many missions had she carried this bag on? Dozens at least. Maybe a hundred? She sighed and lifted the bag to begin repacking it when a ration package rolled out. She was about to scoop it back in when it rattled. Why had she put an empty ration pack back in her bag? And what was rattling inside?
She popped it open and shook the contents into her hand. There were three small bones, ancient and dirt-encrusted. They looked as though they’d just been dug from the ground.
“What are those?” Pip asked, making her jump slightly. Minu had completely forgotten about him as he quietly watched her through the camera link.
“Bones,” she said absently. “I found them on the mission to get the codex.”
“You didn’t record them in your mission log.”
Minu nodded. Trust Pip to have memorized every detail of the mission to find the codex and save him from the coma that was threatening to kill him years ago. “No, I’d completely forgotten about them until now.” She leaned back in the chair and thought. “It was on Sunshine, just after I’d gotten the alien mind upgrade from the Weavers and unlocked the Portal. We’d been digging shelters to hopefully survive another day, and I jumped into one to get my bag, when I spotted some ancient bones buried in the ground. We were trying to get the hell out of there before we burned to a crisp. The last thing I wanted Ted and Bjorn to know was that I’d found something scientifically interesting, so I grabbed a few bones, dropped them in a pocket, and forgot about them.”
“Can you run them through the high-resolution scanner for me?”
“Sure,” she said and put them in the holographic imager on her desk. Aaron typically used it while working on engineering projects at home, so it took her a minute to figure out how to make it send the images through the link to the Kaatan.
Pip turned and looked at the data coming through the link. Minu could see his arms moving as he worked with the mostly holographic interfaces on the Kaatan. She considered herself old fashioned; she still liked to tap keys and move icons on screens. A few weeks ago, she’d seen a movie from Earth called Minority Report and was surprised to see them using a display interface almost identical to the Kaatan’s. They used lots of gestures to manipulate computer routines floating in space before them.
“They are metacarpal bones, but I don’t have enough data up here to figure out what kind. Did you see any skull or other skeletal details?”
“No, it was mostly buried.”
Pip shrugged. “Okay, I have a friend in xenophysiology at the U of NJ.”
“Why New Jerusalem? Might be faster to go through my university.”
“Possibly, but they have a better biology department. You guys are more trade science-oriented.”
Minu nodded. It was true.
“But you have a point,” Pip went on. “I’ll send it to U of P as well. Keep the samples sealed away, they might be needed for a genetic extraction to verify the match, if they make one.”
“No problem.” She fished in her desk drawer for a hard-sided container and locked the sample away. “I don’t know that it matters a whole lot.”
“Ted loved the mystery. He wrote a paper on Sunshine.”
“I read it. His theory that the Concordia punished some species by making a new sun and roasting them alive, slowly, was hideous to say the least. Of course, he used it to support his whole ‘super tech’ theory.”
“I’m floating in the biggest proof of that theory.”
“I know. It drives him crazy that he can’t use it and the database to prove his theory to the academic community.” Minu smiled, remembering the discussions she’d witnessed in the university lounge. They were actually more like barely-controlled academic brawls. She knew he was right, and he knew he was right, but it was just another wild theory to every other scientist on the planet. Well, almost every other one. Bjorn knew the truth too. Even though his grasp on reality wasn’t as developed as Ted’s, he knew better than to start fights ju
st for the sake of it.
They worked until Aaron called her for dinner. The fajitas were as good as they smelled. After dinner, they made love. Things weren’t as energetic or as passionate as they had been in the months after their relationship first began, but that was a normal part of life.
His injury made things a little more complicated too, but they knew each other’s bodies and desires so well it didn’t matter. The outcomes were always to their liking, and Minu really loved holding him afterwards and feeling his heart pound after the exertion.
Long after he was asleep, she lay in bed listening to the night sounds of the island. An occasional frog croaked, which was more common as the years went by and the howlers began to give way to non-native species. Was that the yipping of a distant coyote? She’d often wondered about the wisdom of bringing those sneaky carnivores, but the Rusk made that decision, not her people. They’d done well despite the sparse prey and difficult living conditions, and they ranged freely over much of the world.
Inevitably, her thoughts turned to the enigmatic bones sitting in the case on her desk. She added the appearance of alien starships in their system, the revelation of the Tog’s age, and the new truth of humanity’s non-debt to the Tog to her thoughts. What did it all mean? After years of quiet life, Minu felt that things were stating to happen again. Just before she drifted off to sleep, she remembered her father’s journals and the further mysteries contained therein.
* * * * *
Chapter 7
September 19th, 533 AE
Groves Industries Test Field, New Jerusalem Tribe, Bellatrix
A month went by quickly. Aaron’s firm finished the final prototype for the new AX-2, and he drove himself mercilessly to get back in shape. The doctors tried a fifth and final series of nano-treatments for his legs and, finally, found success. After almost four years, his wounds were nearly healed.