by Trevor Wyatt
“We did it…” Alex mutters, a bit unsure. Once the explosion vanishes, we see what is left of the ship, a sea of debris and bodies. I am chilled by the fact that I have probably just slaughtered a thousand sentient beings.
“Captain,” Alex says, “No One is hailing us.”
“On screen,” I say, taking my best posture by the Captain’s chair.
She is all smiles and I can hear cheers and jubilation on her ship’s bridge. “Congratulations, Captain Jeremy. You and your crew are heroes. Your money will be wired to you shortly and your charges have been dropped.” She pauses for a while. “We could use men like you in our ranks.”
I shake my head. “Thanks, but I really don’t like working for spooks.”
No One draws a blank. She neither denies nor confirms my assertion. “Thanks again. Desist from running contrabands along the border. You may not be so lucky next time.” The super-hot commander vanishes from the screen, leaving me wondering how my close brush with death at the hands of the Sonali counts as being lucky.
4
Dark Harvest
I'll be honest, the main reason I came to the Beruit colony in Edoris sector was to get away from the boring life my parents had planned for me. My dad is a farmer, and his dad was a farmer, and his dad was a farmer. And it was my dad's dream for me to settle down on the family farm with a nice girl and continue the tradition.
I wanted my life to be different, so when I saw the first holo-advert promising that life on Beruit would be a "new home in the stars," I couldn’t sign up fast enough. My dad was mad for a while, but then he grudgingly admitted that if he had had the chance, he probably would have signed up too.
"Hell," he says giving me a grin, “You’re only young once." I think he thought I might just go to Beruit and change my mind and come home. He could understand a young man wanting to be somewhere else, but I think he figured I'd always want to come back to the farm.
I remember how excited I was when I finally boarded the ship to Beruit. It was exactly two years before the war started. Like the other passengers onboard, I was both scared and excited as we decelerated from FTL into normal orbit.
The planet was an amazing combination of colors: blues, greens, and oranges. I couldn't wait to get on the ground. I was so eager to do so that I accidentally shoved the person in front of me as we departed the ship. I started to apologize when she turned around. Like lightning, her eyes struck me with their beauty and openness. She told me her name was Nadia, and I recall her being very amused when it took me a while to respond with my name, "Dave, Dave Hanshaw, " I finally sputtered out.
"Pleased to meet you, Dave Hanshaw." She smiled, making me feel immediately at ease.
I asked her out that day. Six months later we were married.
How time flies…
I adjust the cooling cap I'm wearing to improve my line of sight. The cap contains an enclosed tube of water surrounded by inert hydrogen to serve as a constant coolant. Beruit is one of the Terran Union’s most recent terraforming projects. The planet had been nothing but dust and rocks, and now it is a lush landscape.
We are all farmers here, mostly, there are a few exceptions, my wife among them, but in our little corner of the Edoris sector, the Beruit colony—the main employment is in agriculture. Arid farming, specifically.
I laugh at the irony: I left home to escape becoming a farmer and look at me now. "Though I guess that makes me the family's first space farmer," I say, chuckling. It's almost harvest time. I scan the field, my eyes looking for any signs of an irregular green color—there!
I take off at a run keeping my eyes on that blob of neon green.
As I run I see Tamra in the lemongrass field looking the other way. "Tamra! We've got hysee in field 22!" She turns at my shout, dropping the irrigation tube she's holding.
"Keep your eye on it, I'll get the flares!" she yells across the way as she heads for the nearest equipment shed.
Beruit may be a paradise, but every paradise has its price. For us, it's the hysee. We believe they are the only true native life form here. We found them, or they found us, a few weeks after we landed.
Hysee are a unique blend of mammalian and reptilian traits. They have tough reptilian skin that allows them to remain in direct sunlight for hours, absorbing heat to speed their metabolisms. However, unlike Earth reptiles, they are able to store this heat with a furry underbelly of skin making them less susceptible to temperature changes. They are bright green in color, almost neon. They are omnivores, eating both plants and animals based on whatever they can get their teeth on.
We call them "hysee" because as soon as they spot you, they begin making noises that sound like "high-see, high-see, high-see." We thought it was cute until we realized that was how they call each other. One hysee can be an aggravation. A dozen hysee become an army capable of mass destruction.
We learned that the hard way the first year when half of the fields we planted were destroyed. It had only taken them one day to wipe out half of our food supply.
I see Tamra run towards me, with two flares tight in her fists. "Here!" she tosses one to me as she closes the distance between us. I see her eyes widen as she sees the swarm of hysee over my right shoulder. "My god…I've never seen so many."
I've had time to count while I waited for her to bring the flares. I had to stop when I got to thirty. This is not looking good. I catch the flare and turn. She stops, and we both pop the lids off the flares.
"You take right," I say, "I'll do left."
The best defense against the hysee is fire, specifically helium-ignited flares designed for low-level dispersal, which is ideal since the hysee are strictly terrestrial creatures.
"One, two, three!" I yell as we both toss our flares. The flares are designed to ignite on contact and to burn inward instead of outward. The flares target the hysee formations while also saving as much of the harvest as possible.
The flares ignite where they fall, causing the hysee to panic and flee, but it is too late. The fire has attached to them, and the more they try to escape, the more they run into each other covered in flames. Tamra and I watch in silence as they burn until there is no movement left.
"Those flares your wife designed are something else," Tamra says with immense respect.
"Thanks," I say, smiling with pride.
Nadia is part of the team focused on merging science with agriculture to keep our terraforming on track. It had been her proposal to use the flares to fight the invasion of the hysee. However, she met a lot of skepticism initially. Many of the Council of Farmers felt it was too risky.
The winter that the hysee ate half of our fields, Nadia's prototype was deployed. The eradication was so successful that the hysee didn't return for two winters. But when they did they came in greater numbers. Despite this, we were able to fight them back with the flares.
"Go home," Tamra tells me, "I'll take care of this mess."
"You're a dear, thanks,” I say with relief. “Tell that wife of yours she's one lucky woman."
"Oh, she knows," Tamra smiles, "Now, get going."
"Yes ma'am, thanks again," I say, taking off the cooling cap. I start a soft trot homeward bound.
I see Merena in the yard with Tolin. She's sitting in the faux sandbox Nadia rigged for her. We both agreed that real sand is too unsanitary for daily play, but synthetic sand could be cleaned, filtered, and altered very easily.
"Daddy, daddy!" she squeaks at the sight of me. She's losing baby teeth, so her words whistle through where her two front teeth are missing. I pick her up, hugging her tight.
"How's my baby girl?" I give her a kiss. I plop her back down in the sand where she happily starts filling up a bucket.
"Hey Dad," Tolin steps to me. He's only two years older than Merena, but he's quiet, serious, and always thinking. He takes after his mom. I ruffle his hair the way he hates and then pull him into a hug. He smiles.
"Where's your mom?"
"She's out back, working." Of course.
"On hysee stuff?"
He looks perplexed. "I dunno, she says she’s working on the ego system."
"Ego system, huh?" I laugh. Tolin smiles. "Watch your sister," I say as I move toward the back of the house. I hear my wife mumbling as I approach, her back to me.
I start talking loud so as not to startle her, "So, Tolin says you're fixing the ego system?"
She whirls, her eyes still serious even as her mouth quirks into a smile.
"Well," she says, "It's a good thing you showed up then."
"Oh, ouch," I say mock hurt. She gives me a kiss.
"Dinner?" I ask hopefully. She sighs, "You know where the resequensor is the same as I do." My eyebrows raise...
She breaks into a laugh. "Oh, boy did I get you!" She tucks a piece of her yellow hair behind her ear, giggling. "The tomatoes are stewing with some of that fresh basil you brought in yesterday."
"Yum," I say, "I'll bring the kids in."
"Make sure they wash their hands," she says, turning back to her research. “I’ll be there in a minute, just want to finish up here..."
I know she'll be more than a few minutes, but that's fine by me. I like these moments I get alone with the kids. Merena rushes out of the bathroom slapping my shirt with her still slightly damp hands, "Daddy, fly! Daddy fly!" I scoop her up and put her on my shoulders, holding her legs and zooming around a bit before setting her down near her toys.
Tolin follows me into the kitchen. I decide to add some carrots to the mix. "Tolin, can you get the cutting slate?" He pulls open the middle drawer, wraps his fingers around it and hands it up to me. "Thanks."
I open the key coded lock to our knife drawer. I pull out a soft vegetable cutter and start slicing. "Tolin, start setting the table, so everything will be ready when mom comes in."
I look out the rounded kitchen window and see her heading to the house. As we all sit down to dinner, I think again about how excited I was to come to Beruit. I remember my dad changed his tone when he came to visit last month. We sat back and drank some bourbon that he brought over. The fields that grew it had successfully been scrubbed of all radioactivity from the Third World War forty years ago and they had immediately started distilling the stuff. They had started uncasking it only recently – maybe ten years ago. My dad had paid an arm and a leg to celebrate with me.
“Don’t come back to Earth, son,” he had told me as we sat on our porch. “You got a life here. A wife and family. I’m proud of you.”
That night, after dinner, with the windows open and the night breeze winding through, as I spoon against Nadia, I think about my Dad. How happy I was to hear him tell me he was proud of me. I think about the life he said I had built. I think about my life. Our life. Our life together. Me, Nadia, Merena and Tolin.
I fall asleep, thinking I'm the luckiest, happiest man living in Beruit.
My synapse alarm wakes me right on cue at 4:00 am. No one on Beruit uses a digital alarm clock. The circadian rhythms of Beruit are close to Earth's, but not identical. On Earth traveling between time zones gives you jet lag. Not fatal, but you tend to feel like shit for a few days. Traveling between planets don't give you jet lag, but the way it affects your sleep feels about the same.
To accelerate our acclimation, the scientists, Nadia included, came up with an injection that synchronizes our temporal synapses with the planet's day/night cycle. With a few tweaks, the nanites inside us evolved to became literal internal clocks. It is a great system that allows us not to have to worry about waking our family with loud, annoying alarms.
The nanites also give us a boost of adrenaline to jumpstart our metabolism. Falling back to sleep is not an option—but sometimes I wish it was possible because I miss sleeping in.
"All right, nanites, I'm up, I'm up” I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Nadia is already up. I can hear the clatter of dishes and the low chatter of the children in the kitchen. I will join them soon, but first, a shower.
Showers on Beruit are a mixture of fine grit and pumice. We save most of the water for the crops. As I dress, I hum to myself, buttoning up my shirt. I grab my cooling cap and head to the kitchen.
I kiss Nadia as she stirs some scrambled eggs. "You coming home regular time?"
"Yeah, shouldn't be a problem...unless more hysee come up."
"How are the flares holding up?"
"They work like a charm," I say, picking up Merena and giving her a kiss on the cheek. "Took the hysee horde out in only a few minutes.”
"Daddy, what does whoorrrdd mean?" Nadia and I lock eyes, Merena's attempt to say "horde" sounds like an Earth word neither one of us have heard (or used) since our misspent youth.
"It means a lot, in fact," I look at Nadia, her eyes full of mischief," The best way to say that there are a lot of hysees is to use words like ‘bunch’ as in there are a ‘bunch of hysee’ or ‘a lot of hysee’."
"A bunnnnnn!" says Merena.
"No," says Tolin, "A baaaaa---chhh." He coughs mid-syllable making it sound like another Earth word that is not very pleasant.
"Yeah, let's just say ‘a lot’ of hysee."
Merena smiles, "Ahhhbbbbbt" she says her teeth making it sound like "bbb" so that she says "abutt".
I throw my hands up in defeat.
"I'll make dinner tonight," says Nadia, giving me a quick peck as I head out the door.
I walk through the fields, my cooling cap already on my head, so the UV from Beruit' sun doesn't cook my brains. I see Tamra hooking the long irrigation tubes to the main water engine.
"Hey!" I say, waving as I come up to her. She smiles, keeps one gloved hand on the pump as it fills.
"I've already topped yours off,” she says, nodding down at my irrigation line.
"Thanks!" I twist the valve to shut off the current to the water line; then I carefully unlatch the rubber ties around the pipe. The pump, now near to bursting with water is heavy and awkward. I alternate how I carry it depending on my mood. Today I decide that my shoulders might need a rest after carrying Merena, so I tuck it into the crook of my arm.
Secure in my grip, I begin the careful walk to my field. It’s important that I don't spill any of our precious water until I reach the part of my field that needs irrigation today.
My progress is slow, but I'd rather be careful than drop the pipe full of water. I find myself thinking how my dad would be laughing if he saw me dragging a pipe full of water to a field. Last time we spoke by holo-vid, he wanted us to visit for Christmas this year. That was a month before he had a heart attack. He was working in a field when it happened. Just like how I am now.
I shake off the creepy feeling that comes over me. I have work to do.
I sweep my eyes from side to side out of habit, keeping a keen eye out for hysee, though I didn't think we would see them reappear for a while. Usually, after we retaliate to an attack, we don't see them for a month or more. I readjust the pipe as I carry it, wondering if I should have propped it on my shoulder after all. I don't see Tamra anymore, but maybe she's coming back later today. We make our own hours here. As long as we do our jobs and do them well, we get to have a lot of flexibility.
And then I see something that makes my heart freeze in my chest.
A fire...in a field. And another one farther away. I lay the pipe down slowly, making sure it doesn't bend or burst. I stand up as my eyes try to figure out what the hell is going on. I see another fire; that makes three. How could so many hysee be attacking at once? I turn toward the equipment shed and freeze.
Hovering above me is a spaceship, the likes of which I have never seen before. For one thing, it's big, easily twice as wide as the huge frigate that brought us all from Earth. And it has an odd outer skin, almost like the scales of a snake. For a moment I wonder if we misjudged the hysee, if like us, they are not natives of Beruit—and then my blood runs cold as the obvious answer makes me choke.
It's the Sonali. From the news vids. They've invaded every corner of Edoris Sector.
And now they'v
e found Beruit.
They've found us.
There's an odd vibration in the air, almost like a static building. A shot explodes from the ship destroying a part of Tamra's lemongrass field. I jump back watching as fire from the blast starts to feed on the crops.
I realize with horror where the other fires in the fields are from. I run toward the shed. I have to reach the alarm, I've got to let everyone know! I jump over a row of crops, trying to do my best to zigzag my way to the shed. I'm also trying to put every ounce of energy and beyond into my movements.
I'm hoping I'm too small for the ship to notice, but as a shot passes by my right shoulder singeing my work uniform, I yelp in pain. I run faster, one hand clamped over my shoulder, though I know the burn is superficial—it grazed me, leaving a bloody ooze.
But I may not be so lucky next time. I have a sudden inspiration. I change direction that will hopefully put the Sonali ship off for a moment, and run toward the water pump. The ship changes direction with ease. No wonder our colonies are dropping like flies—it's obvious their technology is superior to ours.
At the pump, I dislodge one of the pipes and do the dumbest thing possible.
I pour the water all over myself. I cringe at all the water I'm wasting, but I have to make it to the shed, and the ship seems to be shooting a self-igniting accelerant—in different circumstances, I'd love to tell Nadia about it. It reminds me of our anti-hysee flares.
Nadia. Merena. Tolin.
I tell myself that if the ship is here, then they are safe at home.
But for how long?
Before thoughts of their safety derail me from what I need to do, I stop thinking and just start running. I don't worry about zig-zagging, at this point I'm playing to win regardless of the cost to myself. I see the shed, door propped open. All I have to do is get inside to sound the alarm. We have different levels depending on the emergency situation. I'll need to put on the highest alert we have.
I'm almost there—when something hits the back of my leg making me tumble into the dirt. I howl, grabbing at the back of my leg—it feels like it's on fire.