by Trevor Wyatt
My wetsuit idea may have saved my life; it certainly saved my leg. I move my hand. The flesh is red, but it's there. I can't say the same for my pants. Blue fibers blacken into ash curling away into the dust.
I can only hope that if the aliens hit me again...I still can't believe I'm saying that. We may have gone to the stars, but humans had been the only intelligent life until recently. Then the first contact happened. Then the war started.
We were no longer alone. And we were no longer the most intelligent life form.
The Sonali were intelligent and deadly.
And they’re here.
Somehow, I always hoped our little pocket of paradise would remain just that—paradise. The holo-news feeds we saw of other settlements on other planets were a horror show. Entire colonies wiped out in a matter of hours. We set up an alarm system across the colony. Each equipment shed contains a connected alarm system, set one off and they all receive the same alert.
I push myself up; leg sore, mind focused on getting to the alarm. I'm ten steps away when the shed explodes. I throw up my hands to shield my eyes.
I feel pain in my chest as something flies into me knocking me backward. I land hard on my back, with the breath knocked out of me. I gasp, my eyes stinging as I see what's left of the shed burn. I push at the edge of the object on my chest. I feel a painful tug. Part of the object, a bit of wire, impales my chest. I continue to gasp. My vision darkens. I’m losing blood...I hear a familiar voice shout "Over here!"
And then I black out.
Darkness. Pain. I move, hissing as my eyes blink open. Tamra’s face is over me. "Hold still, Dave, you're going to be all right." She smiles at me, then says, "Sorry."
"Why--" I scream as she rips the remaining bit of metal from my chest.
"Sorry," she repeats, her mouth a grim line. She starts to stitch me up. I see some of the other farmers behind her, Jenks and Harlow. They look grim. "How long was I out?"
"Only a few minutes. Can you stand?"
I nod. "Good," she pulls me to my feet, with help from Harlow, her wife.
Wife.
"Where is Nadia?" I snatch my hand away and start running toward the house.
Tamra yells, "Wait! we'll come with you!" I don't stop.
My chest feels like I've been dipped in lava. My side hurts, my breath hitches...I'm sure a lung has been punctured, likely by a broken rib. I'm equally sure that Tamra patched me up as well as she could. I lean forward, hoping to push my feet faster.
I spit blood on the ground as my steps take me across the last ridge separating the fields from our residence.
Our home...
“No…No, no!” I scream.
I struggle down the slope falling on the ground, my hands reaching out...
I almost convince myself that I’m wrong.
That the empty scorched bit of land in front of me is not where my home once stood.
But I know the steps that lead me here by heart...the path I have cut across twice a day for almost three years.
Nothing.
Nothing stands where our house used to be.
No debris. Only ashes like the bits of fabric from my clothes. I begin to see the outline of the house framed in the dust. It reminds me of the way I used to draw in the dirt with a stick as a kid.
And then I see the other outlines. The ones my mind telling me to stop staring at, stop looking at—
"Oh my god!”
I vomit on the grass as I crawl, snot dripping toward these familiar outlines.
The outlines of the ashes paint a portrait for me of the last moments of my family.
Nadia, smart woman that she is (was, my mind corrects coldly) took the children inside the house into the innermost room. There they huddled together, holding each other. Merena is on Nadia's right, close by her side, Tolin equally close, their ashes merging in one dark outline.
The outline of Nadia's head suggests she was looking back toward the door. Back toward the fields. Looking for me.
I move to touch the edge of the outline but pull my hand back in shame.
My family died, alone, terrified, without me.
My fingers dig into the dirt, pulling it up. Screaming with rage, I throw the clods where our house once stood.
A blast near me knocks me on my side. In my grief, I failed to notice that the Sonali ship has followed me.
I gain my feet quickly as I see the ship hover above me like a colossal judgment.
I raise my hands beckoning to it. "Come on! I'm right here! Come ON!" I spy a rock, chuck it toward the ship, knowing it is foolish. I might as well be an ant screaming at the sun.
Hands raised, I walk toward the ship. I want to surrender. I don't even want to live.
As I watch a smaller craft, a corvette, slices across the Sonali craft taking a chuck out of its hull. The Sonali craft begins to smoke, then light dances across it like fireworks. The giant ship begins to descend. It crashes meteor bright and smoking.
Numb, I watch the ship burn, the Sonali joining my family as ashes.
The corvette appears unhurt, but then tilts, exposing raw wounds from its suicidal attack on the larger craft. They took out the ship at great sacrifice. I notice strange lights, like flares, shoot from if as it makes its final descent. Sparks, I think, heat trails, but then my mind considers another option, "Escape pods." I run toward the downed craft.
I realize as I run, my chest constricting, that the battle between the two craft only appeared to be near. By the time I reach the crash site, I am nearly blind with pain and black circles dot my vision. I am losing consciousness. I stagger past the remains of the corvette that is still smoking.
I find three escape pods lying on their sides like cracked eggs, their hatches open. I look into the nearest one. It’s empty. No blood. I check the other two. Empty as well. I lean against the last pod, my breath ragged.
I close my eyes. I feel my heart pumping painfully in my chest. It's a relief; I’m ready to die. I want to see my family again.
I hear the unmistakable sound of a pulse gun charging. I flick my eyes open. A woman stands before me; she eyes me, gun aimed at my head. I don't move.
"Leave him, Sheila," says a large man stepping up behind her. "He looks half dead already."
She lowers her gun, holstering it, but watches me closely.
"I'm Tolhe," he says extending a hand. I don't shake it. After a second he drops it.
"Dave," I say, then cough.
"Where's Asel?" Another man walks up, skin dark as the ash on the ground, his eyes a brilliant blue. Without preamble, he brings me a canister of water, tips it into my mouth.
I drink it down in large gulps.
"Thank you," I say, my voice quiet, my throat raw. He nods, leaves the canister with me.
"Asel, Sheila, check out the Sonali ship. They didn't survive, but maybe something on their ship did. Something we can use." They nod and head toward the wreckage.
"I take it you're a local," says Tolhe. I nod.
"Well, as you probably guessed, we're not. Of course neither are the Sonali." At the mention of the alien race, I clench the canister in my fingers, wishing it was something I could break. Tolhe sees my reaction.
"Is it just you?" he asks.
I nod, tears, hot and shameful drip down my nose.
"My family....those sons of bitches killed them! I wasn't with them! If I'd been there..."
"You'd be dead," finishes Tolhe.
"Yes, but I would have died with them....they died without me."
Tolhe unsnaps a flask tucked under his coat, "Here."
"I'm not thirsty."
"This isn't water." I take it, start gulping it. It's unfamiliar to me, but I drink it anyway. It tastes like some sort of homebrew. It's thick, strong and most definitely illegal. I finish it, hand back the container. "Thanks. You smugglers?"
"No," he says unoffended.
"Mercenaries?"
"Close," he says, pocketing the flask. "We're a special branch of
the military offensive targeting the Sonali. We don't get the fancy ships, fancy weapons, or much weapons at all. What we do get is the leeway to fight the enemy in the manner of our choosing." Our methods are not always sanctioned, and many consider them to be downright suicidal."
He looks at me. "The pay is decent," he continues, "not that you'll have a lot of free time to spend it." His two compatriots have returned.
"No survivors, some salvage, mostly tech," says Sheila glancing at me, then Tolhe. A look passes between them. She leaves. Asel says something in another language. Tolhe gives him a glare, "Don't be rude to our new recruit."
"Hey!" I say looking at him, "What do you mean 'recruit'? I'm not a soldier; I'm a farmer."
"You were a farmer," he says, looking me directly in the eye, "You had a family. There is nothing for you here now."
Rage so hot it feels I'm reaching into the bowels of the planet gripping its molten core surges through my body as my fist connects with Tolhe's nose.
There's a 'crack' sound as blood flies from his nostrils. He's a big man, but I knock him back a step.
Sheila and Asel step to me but stop as Tolhe puts his hand up. He pinches his nose, then wipes away bloody snot. He lumbers toward me, and I think now, I’m going to die.
"You don't need to be a soldier to fight this war. You only need a reason, or hell, fuck reasons, you only need rage." He pokes my chest, near my heart. "The most dangerous person in a fight is the one who has the least to lose. So, tell me, Dave, what exactly do you have left to lose?"
He puts his hand on my shoulder, then lets go and starts walking away. I figure that means the recruitment speech is over.
"Asel, you take point, we'll retrace our steps, figure out where we can hit these assholes next."
"We'll need to find something to replace the corvette, and we're running out of ground explosives," says Sheila walking next to Tolhe.
I am forgotten.
In the land of the dead, the living man is...
Nothing.
I jog to catch up. Tolhe hears me and turns around; he looks smug. Sheila looks annoyed. Asel looks at me, then goes back to walking, nonplussed.
“Would flares designed for ground dispersal work?"
Tolhe looks thoughtful. "Very likely," he says.
"Then follow me," I say heading off toward the shed on the other side of the property, hoping that the vault where the flares are kept pressure-sealed has withstood the violence.
I know the code because Nadia uses the same key code for everything. I tap the code in solemnly, grateful when the door swings up revealing bundles of flares, primed and ready.
"Well," says Tolhe grinning wide at the selection, "It looks like Christmas came early this year."
Shelia pushes past me grabbing bundles to load into satchels, "Let's get to work."
I think of all the damage we can do with these flares if we can get close enough to the Sonali ships.
"Yes," I say hefting a bundle of flares in my hand, "Let's."
Life. It’s interesting what you’ll remember when it’s all gone.
But I’m not gone yet.
5
The Beruit Massacre
We are the worst of the worst. The cruelest of the cruelest, yet we cannot say that we are the best of the best. Every Sonali soldier hates the Terrans. At least that’s what we’ve been made to believe. As for me, I am not so sure I hate a people I have not even had the chance to meet.
It’s barely three months since the Terran Union President declared war on Sonali. It came as a mild surprise to us that a race as painfully inferior as Terrans would take such a step. In fact, most of us in the military caste saw it as an insult, much like a dog would feel if a fly were to challenge it.
Gladly, we rode to war, butchering the weaklings wherever they were in the galaxy. We’ve been picking them one by one for we are in no hurry to exterminate them from existence. I mean, these Terrans are so weak. Forget our advanced starship vessels. Forget our advanced particle beam blasters. Even close quarter’s combat, they are so weak and feeble, that one must wonder how they rose out of the evolutionary soupy puddle.
“Fellow brothers!” roars the sub-legate of my hundred man unit, Colonel Zelvin Grayhill aka Colonel Zel. He’s a burly-looking Sonali male with a fierce and furious look and zero iota of love for the Terrans. He’s standing on one of the long and narrow rows of tables that fill up the massive mess hall. He’s holding a bottle of rakjtag on one hand and a pretty looking Sonali woman who’s dressed in such a provocative manner in his other hand.
“Tonight we drink and we fuck,” he says. The soldiers around yell in acquiescence, drumming their metal cups on the bench and humming deeply such that the entire hall begins to vibrate.
“And tomorrow night we slay the Terrans, burn their towns, rape their women, kill their leaders, bomb their buildings and level their goddamn colonies for Sonali Prime!”
“For Sonali Prime!” the entire room replies.
It’s such a thunderous reply that I shiver. I’m in the back of the room, sitting by my plate of soup and metal cup of water. The soup is syrupy and filled with all the essential vitamins and minerals that a Sonali would ever need. Rumor has it that it’s also infused with some psychotropic agent. How else can you justify some of the atrocities this particular military outfit has committed?
Atrocities that Sonali Prime would never publicly admit to, yet it is one of the most efficient and most funded division in the Sonali Ground Forces.
Hell Fire Brigade.
All is fair in war, it seems.
I don’t have rakjtag in my cup. I only have water. Unlike Terrans, Sonali don’t really need water to survive. We aren’t wired that way. In fact, we can go months without a sip of water. As long as we’re breathing in argon, we are good.
But it’s compulsory for every soldier aboard this transport vessel to feed and drink at least once every day because the government needs your strength to destroy the Terrans.
Yeah, about that, I’m not really down with it. Still, in a system that kills off the weak and prunes the strong, I have to remain strong, otherwise I’ll lose my life.
You see, the Sonali Army is not like the Tyreesian Army or the other armies of the other races we have come in contact with. The Sonali Army is unorthodox in the way it governs its people. There’s a chain of command. But in other armies, if you breach the chain of command, you are court-martialed or exiled or something along that line.
In the Sonali Army, if you breach the chain of command, you are killed on the spot by your sub-legate. Of course, the sub-legate has to demonstrate that the soldier has breached the chain of command, not before the Generals in the Army or some board of enquiry like I hear the Terrans have, but before the troops of that unit.
Sonali Prime thrives on the principle that every member of the society has a place and a role to play in the furtherance of the ideals and ethos of the Sonali people. The systems set up in Sonali Prime and all other Sonali colonies pride itself in defining that place or role from birth and training that child to fit in that assigned role.
The consequences of going against the set path can be so grave. So much that conformity would not only be the wiser choice but the most sought after choice.
This is why we feel like we are superior to most other races. We have a perfect society where everyone is working at their peak because they are right where they fit. At least, this is what everyone thinks and believes. From when I was old enough to be literate, I’ve always believed differently.
I am a member of the military caste today, not a member of the scholar caste, which I desire terribly to be or the merchant caste that make all the money and live large. Not the religious caste that are closer to God either, or the leadership caste that basically decides what the other caste systems can and cannot do.
This happened not of my own volition, but the volition of those who stood over my neonatal form and pronounced my destiny.
How utterly c
ruel. How unabashedly shameful. And to think we pride ourselves in such conduct is totally unsettling.
At first, in my childhood and early teenage years, I fought against the timeline set for me. I didn’t care about working hard and training and learning how to fire a weapon. In fact, I didn’t associate with the other children that had been pronounced soldiers. I rather associated with people who were members of the caste I wanted to belong to—the scholar caste.
I would learn the error and graveness of my ways, when I was later called before the Council of Appropriation (the same Council that decides on caste—a sub agency under the leadership caste, of course) and punished. This punishment involved severe beating and torturing to toughen me up. They decided if I wouldn’t go the easy way and grow in strength as my peers did, then I would have to go the hard way.
For seven days, I was deprived of sleep. I was beaten mercilessly. I was deprived of food. I was tortured. My parents did not visit me. They couldn’t. And it was not because they were not allowed, but because they didn’t have the strength of heart to walk into the imposing Council of Appropriation building in the Leadership Estate of Sonali Prime.
They feared that the slightest nonconformity found in them may lead to punishments they were not prepared to endure. But more than that, they also feared what they would do if they found me—their thirteen year old, pre-Ascension daughter—shredded and bleeding out in one of the numerous subterranean correctional facilities (a fancy way of saying a dank, musky dungeon).
“Are you eating that?” says a deadly low, belligerent voice beside me.
I don’t look at the soldier. The noise from the soldiers closer to our leader at the middle of the cafeteria is overwhelming.
I shake my head, keeping my eyes on my food in the present, and my mind in the dark and horrible past.
I was born a girl. It is still a mystery what a Sonali would see in a girl and decide they should become a soldier. It bewilders me. And it’s not about the Ascension Ceremony, because the Ascension Ceremony works differently for the military caste.
If you are a boy and you are declared a member of the military caste, then you may or may not have a choice as to whether you want to Ascend to become a fertile girl or to remain sterile. The same goes for a girl, depending on the ratio of males to females in the military. There is a fixed ratio that must be maintained at any fixed period of time, hence a lot of people get to choose, and others don’t.