Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  A few levelheaded leaders have risen, people who still have the capacity for reason and compassion. But they’re becoming fewer and fewer. Even Command General Medina, leader of this fleet cruiser, the Celestial, seems to be losing sight of the goals. We need to bring order and meaning to the lives that are left. Halt the slaughter and begin bringing others onto our side, the side that fights for freedom before all. The people who were once citizens, as I once was, who had it easy before the war and thought they were being looked after by the Admin—like children—they have to know deep inside that their lives were so simple and sedate only because they consented to well-masked tyranny. And some already have. Whether it was their wounded dignity that forced them to step over, or something deeper and more noble, something like an innate understanding that there is nothing more important than freedom and self-governance, a great number of these people have quit cowering and picked up the banner of anti-Admin sentiment.

  Yet the fighting continues.

  ONE

  For the love of all that is holy. If they’d shut up, I could sleep.

  This grating thought finally brings me fully back from the nearly comatose sleep of complete exhaustion. Two and a half days rendering round-the-clock maintenance on the Nebula and Orika, our two largest scouts, prepping them for the next retrieval and salvage run has completely done me in. Once I found time to take a break, I would have jumped to my death off Keum Libre’s oceanic landing platform just to get some much-needed shut-eye if I hadn’t known I’d be able to bunk up in Venus’s maintenance shed before heading back to the colony. Awake once more, groggy, cranky, and covered in oil and carbon dust, I don’t think I’ve been asleep for more than a couple of hours. But now I have to listen to whoever’s outside bitching at each other?

  I’ll give them something to yell about. Sitting up, I have to jam my hands into the small of my back, trying to rub away the stiffness nesting there. Cramp inducing or not, the purgatory of sleeping on Venus’s tucked-away cot still beats the crowded, open-bay barracks of Keum Libre’s old penal colony. Until now. And I don’t like staying alone in the one-room outbuilding Karl and I share when he’s not there.

  The argument that awakened me continues.

  “Doctor, the only thing you are in charge of on this rock is your pointless convalescent house for the broken and dying people you treat. You don’t decide for me or anyone else what goes.” Quantum’s voice, his usual lack of tact making it unmistakable.

  “You’re wrong,” Vitruzzi answers. “This colony has chosen a system of leadership. And that means Brady and me.”

  “Chosen. Don’t make me laugh. You mean your demagoguery and threats have made everyone your puppets.”

  These two again. Quantum and Vitruzzi have been going rounds lately, but I haven’t been able to find out what exactly their disagreement is about. I don’t care really; I just want to stay focused on making our regular salvage runs around the system and lying low. Anything to keep from being sucked back into playing medic to the injured people inhabiting the colony’s makeshift field hospital—the broken and dying people Quantum’s talking about—even if it means thirty-six hours as slave labor, forced to beat the dents out of our busted-up scout ships.

  “Quantum, I’ve already told you, and I’m getting tired of doing it, that you’re more than welcome to leave. I can have Erikson or Strahan drop you at any point you’d like on their next run.”

  “And I will. When you give me access to the soil compound.”

  Soil compound? What the hell?

  A long pause, then Vitruzzi: “You can’t just let that stuff loose anywhere you want. There are still people living on most of the planets. The compound isn’t an asset; it’s a poison.”

  Quantum responds, “A few people maybe dying is a price I’m willing to pay for the chance—”

  Voice pitched low, she cuts him off. “There’s been enough death; we don’t need to add to it. It’s time to rebuild, not continue the destruction. If you’re seriously thinking about using that compound…you’re talking about genocide.”

  Quantum’s voice, however, hasn’t lost any of its volume. “You would know,” he responds.

  Footsteps, only one set, recede, and then the maintenance bay’s door slams shut.

  The fact is that a number of quarrels and scuffles have broken out between settlers over the last few months—even among people you’d never expect to be short-tempered or malcontent. My brother David and I have talked about it a couple of times, and it seems to boil down to two things. First, simply put, people are going stir-crazy. Nothing about trying to make this tiny settlement with less than two hundred inhabitants livable and viable has been easy, and those of us who don’t get off planet much are stuck with a radically reduced—everything. Space, resources, new faces, they are all in short supply on Keum Libre. Second, people are having a hard time trying to adjust to the way things are now that there’s no longer anything remotely close to a central government to govern the worlds out of chaos, along with the fact that half the Obals are wastelands. It used to be a big system. Now we’re all just the last threads of a tattered spiderweb still clinging to the gutter after a cataclysmic storm. Personally, though, there’s not a damn thing I miss about the Admin.

  It’s still quiet on the other side of the maintenance shed’s door. Remaining seated, I listen awhile longer, more rattled by V and Quantum’s conversation than I want to admit. Venus is out on the platform, working on the damaged scout Karl, David, and I had been hopping around the quadrant in before three of its four stabilizers had gone tits up. No one else is in the shed now besides me and whoever stayed behind after their argument.

  Concluding they may both be gone, I lie back down, already feeling the heaviness of craved-for sleep pressing against my eyelids. My thoughts return to the overheard discussion and the soil compound. We’d found thousands of kilograms of it stored on the bottom level of the landing platform. The Admin had engineered the stuff to chemically alter a planet’s soil and make it more fertile in a matter of only a couple decades, thus giving them the power to terraform more planets and make them not only more productive, but more livable. Keum Libre had been the experiment that proved its efficacy.

  And, we’ve learned from the survivors, its deadliness.

  After synthesizing and analyzing the data stored out here on the platform, as well as what we could retrieve of the data Bodie, my old friend who’d been killed by the Admin, had taken from the Fortress over two years ago, we know phase one of the compound’s cycle is to wipe out everything living. By introducing a poisonous catalyst, which is beyond my rudimentary chemistry knowledge to understand, it clears an area completely of organic life, and essentially lets newly introduced flora and fauna regrow new ecological foundations from scratch. Perfect if you move into a place ten years after the compound’s deployment. Not so great if you happen to be an organic life-form that’s there from inception.

  It sounds like Quantum wants access to it, but what for? Keum Libre has room enough to sustain our current population, as well as plenty more for expansion. The compound is dangerous, and no one here is an expert on chemical or planetary engineering, so we don’t even have a full understanding of how it works. The data on the KL data-storage blocks has shown us all we really need to know: keep it locked up and don’t let anyone near it.

  Despite my tiredness, the questions evoked by their argument don’t let me sleep. I’m trying to shut my mind off by reciting nav-chart coordinates (a technique I’d practiced to perfection when I was still enlisted—anything to push out the constant replay of past firefights) when something starts to feel off. A slight vibration works its way up the cot’s legs, then through its thin fabric and into my back. A low droning noise leaks through the walls, like a million hummingbirds’ wings flapping, deepening slowly until it becomes a buzzing roar outside. They must be testing something on our broken scout, the Nebula, and have the engines cycling. Fantastic. Naptime is officially over.

&
nbsp; Standing up with a groan and a rapidly devolving unzenlike attitude, I walk to the wall and pull my jacket and arms-belt from their hooks. My boots hadn’t made it off my feet before I’d passed out.

  I step out of the cot room and see Vitruzzi seated on a stool inside the maintenance bay, which is really nothing but the psychotically disordered interior of Venus’s old dwelling at Agate Beach, increased by a factor of ten. As Queen of All Things That Fly, Venus is the unquestioned ruler out here, and when I say disordered I’m not being entirely honest. The bay looks like Satan’s funhouse to me and every other “normal” person who dares to enter, but Venus can tell you the location of every part, piece, wire, and nut and bolt it contains, down to the centimeter. And she gets hostile if you move something without telling her. To her radically enhanced brain cycles, this is just an excellent storehouse for the tools of her trade. My nearly three months of living with her at the Beach have inured me somewhat to the chaos, which is my ace in the hole when I need to borrow her quiet little corner of serenity. No one else comes in here without a very specific, and very brief, need.

  I nod at the doc but have to shout to make myself heard. “Everything okay, V?”

  The level of weariness in her eyes is almost shocking. And—there’s something deeper there. Something that reminds me, in the quieter corners of my mind, of the look I’d catch in Rajcik’s eyes, my former black-market arms-smuggling boss, when he was about to do something totally insane.

  She jumps a fraction—so unlike her usual unflappability—then returns my nod. “Didn’t know you were in there, Aly.”

  She says more, but I can’t hear a thing over the Nebula’s engines. Hand-signing that I’m heading back to the colony, I leave her behind. As mentioned, whatever the disagreement is between her and Quantum, it’s none of my business. And I’m happy to keep it that way.

  I run into Venus at the skiff that will take us the six kilometers from the platform to the colony. Looking like a windblown cheetah, she’s shifting her weight from side to side like a little girl who has to pee as she stands at the boat’s release console.

  “You heading back to the mainland?” I ask, walking up beside her.

  “Yep! Jer is making cake for me! My birthday dinner!”

  With the addition of flecks of engine oil, dust, and salty ocean spray covering her, the violence of curls haloing her head, their shade somewhere between the inside of a cantaloupe and the red skin of an apple, only looks more ferocious and indomitable. When I’d met Venus, her hair had been clipped short almost to her scalp, but now, two years later, it’s grown out to her shoulders. Or it would reach her shoulders, except for the nearly afro-tight curls that explode from her head as if filled with electricity. Like everything else about her, from her phosphorescent green eyes to her overcharged brain to her savant flying skills, even her hair is almost impossible to believe. Venus is basically an exclamation point on legs.

  “But I thought your birthday was last month.”

  “It was, but now we’re going to celebrate it every month. Did you try that cake he made me last time?”

  “I didn’t get—”

  “Well, if you had, you’d understand. It tastes just like an orgasm in your mouth, Aly. Really.”

  “Okay, fantastic, that’s all I need to know.”

  Jeremy La Mer, much like Venus, is full of surprises. At first, we’d all assumed he was just a highly talented wire-rat. But he’s proved in these past few months that he can make just about anything sing and dance for him, including cooking and gardening. I guess when civilization takes the kind of nosedive we’ve just experienced, all kinds of hidden talents people didn’t know they had or had never cultivated before suddenly become not just talents, but essential skills.

  Venus finishes the unmooring sequence, and the bay door at the end of the docking hangar begins grinding open. We jump inside the skiff together and she takes the pilot’s seat.

  “It sounded like the Nebula was back in action,” I comment.

  As she double-checks the boat’s systems, she nods. “She’s in good shape. Goodish. We need to replace a bunch of stuff inside the controls and reactors, but she’ll fly fine for now.”

  I don’t like any sentence that ends with the words for now, but I have nothing to respond with. On a planet without a manufacturing plant of any sort, or even people with the skills to construct whatever components we may need, you learn to live with for now until…you can’t.

  “Can you get David or me a list so we can look for derelicts to take parts from on our next run?”

  “Consider it done. And don’t forget. You’re on med-bay duty tonight after the town hall.”

  Town hall? Med-bay duty? “Jesus, Venus, what am I, a robot? When am I supposed to sleep?”

  “Hey, Aly-oop. You volunteered, remember?”

  Even the war was less exhausting.

  TWO

  “Quantum and several others have requested they be given one of our three scout ships to join the colony called Bogotan on Obal 6.”

  Rumbles and the occasional epithet follow Brady’s first order of town hall business. He stands in the center of the desalination plant’s largest filtering room, which may be the only functioning industrial facility remaining in this quadrant, and grits his teeth. He enjoys this about as much as I do. Another town hall and more arguments, or, as I like to call it, another night of slinging bullshit.

  “We only have three! Why give one up?”

  “How does it help our own colony to give away our few resources?”

  “We need all our ships!”

  Brady lets the hollering die down before relaxing his scowl. Deep lines spread out from the edges of his mouth and eyes, making him look twenty years older than he did the short two years ago that I’d met him. He must be somewhere in his midforties, maybe late forties, and still strong. But those lines show many more years of pain and hardship than that. Too many.

  “This is a town hall. I’m only going to remind everyone one time that you wait to be called on. I’m chairing tonight, which makes me in charge.”

  Quantum, who stands near the right front flank of the semicircle of colonists, fronts his own hard scowl on his squished, round face. I can almost read his mind. The only reason we’re here right now is because of him. When the Boelke’s—a light bomber and transport craft we’d commandeered when we left Medina and the PCA Celestial—navigation sequences performed the equivalent of a programming seppuku and left us flying blind just before reaching the moon, he had fixed our radar and visuals with his almost freakish wire-rat skill set as we broke through the atmosphere, giving the engineering team the information they needed to land the cruiser without killing anyone. The Boelke won’t ever fly again, at least not with our current limitations on engineering and mechanical materials, but the sixty passengers and crew aboard it had all survived. Why shouldn’t he get his own long-range ship? The colony has three.

  Narumi, a hardworking aide to Vitruzzi, raises her one hand. The other was blown off at the wrist during the war. A replacement could easily have been created for her under normal circumstances, and no one could have done a better job of it than Vitruzzi herself. But circumstances aren’t normal, and Narumi gets around with only a primitive, nonrobotic prosthetic. Despite this, she gets as much done as anyone else in the colony, and maybe because of it, she’s particularly empathetic with some of the other victims of disfigurement and amputations who’ve found their home on KL. Brady nods in her direction.

  “As everyone knows, Jillian, Tomaz, and I all came from the Obal 6 colony four months ago. Why did we leave? Because they wouldn’t let me stay—they said resources were in too short supply to help a cripple. Why would we give them a ship when they won’t even help a woman who’s missing a hand?”

  Grumbles of agreement, then Dan Hoogs, another ex-Corpsmember (but aren’t most of us now?), steps forward with a hand in the air. Brady nods a go-ahead and Hoogs says, “The more of our own resources we give up, and th
e more they get, the less secure we are. If Quantum wants to live with them, we can drop him off nearby and he can wait to be found. Our assets are limited, and we’re not doing ourselves any favors if we start letting others know what we do—and don’t—have.”

  Almost every face in the room shares expressions of agreement. I glance back toward Quantum. Someone has draped and fastened an old canvas across the wall behind where he stands with the words ADAPT OR DIE carefully stenciled across it in letters a meter high. It’s become the motto of our settlement, replacing “Fight or Die” now that the war is essentially over. Yet some of us have had more trouble than others embracing the newer philosophy. Looking at some of the hardened and angry faces in the room, I wonder if we ever will.

  It’s Quantum’s turn to step forward, but he doesn’t wait for Brady to approve before he speaks. “We’re not suggesting we just hand over one of KL’s ships. Brady”—he flicks a sneer at Brady that’s pretty ballsy, given the crowd—“hasn’t been clear. We would like to borrow a ship to visit Obal 6’s leading city and begin negotiations for joining our two colonies in trade.”

  “What makes you any kind of spokes—?” someone blurts, but Brady’s on it.

  “No talking out of turn, dammit. Or I’ll adjourn the meeting right now.”

  The voices of the crowd hush, but the restless and agitated fidgeting going on around me doesn’t let up. These people feel more and more like they’re being pushed closer to the edge on a daily basis, and it’s beginning to get under their skin.