Colony One

by E. M. Peters

  “I doubt the joint committee would have let you take this joy ride if they had known,” Avery pointed out, and unlike Niko, kept her eyes trained in one spot – directly on him. If it was known that Niko had a blood-relative on Colony One, some might question his motives for joining the mission – perhaps rightly so.

  “It’s too late now,” Niko shot back. “We can’t exactly turn back around and drop me off.”

  “That is really up to me.” The Captain asserted with a look that said she wasn’t bluffing.

  He signed, “Luca and I had a… disagreement before he left. When it looked like there might be an opportunity to make it right… I took it. It doesn’t compromise my function on this ship.”

  Avery nodded, “It better not.” She deactivated and collected her OMNI as she stood, rounding the table to leave. Before she did, she made a point to stand behind Niko, hand on his shoulder. “No more secrets from here on out,” he told him and left before he could respond.

  Niko sat very still. An awkward kind of silence filled the space in her wake.

  “We will be having the food soon, da?” Makenna asked, reverting back to her preferred oblivious state.

  “Almost ready,” the Doctor responded, but showing the same look Finn and Charlie had – one that indicated they were still processing the new information.

  Niko stood, “I’ll find something to eat in my quarters. See you all at first shift.” He informed and left before anyone could protest.

  Instead of going straight to his quarters, he took a left and walked the length of the ship until he found himself in the cargo hold. He navigated his way between boxes that were stacked and secured against the walls or floor. They were intended as care packages for the Colony Alpha and seeing them only intensified his feelings.

  Out of sight from the crew and in the empty, cold space of the cargo hold, Niko finally let go of the façade, kicking a cargo box with force and letting out a shout of strangled emotion.

  Being exposed seriously complicated his plans and he needed time to think of new ones. Since Niko was technically supposed to be on Colony One when it launched, he had to go into what was essentially hiding after Luca took his place. He simply did not report in to his work, picked up all of his things and moved to a different city. He cut contact with everyone who knew him, including his parents. Eventually he gathered up enough money to get the record of his departure on Colony One erased from news releases and all records except for, evidently, the original manifest.

  His original plan had been to get a place on another Colony ship, but he was continuously refused with a rejection message that he did not fit the demographic for candidate passengers. The Task Force seemed to be his only chance to accomplish his goals, but Avery had effectively disrupted his plans.

  He kicked the box again, and then braced his hands on the top stack, letting his head hang as he tried to calm himself down and reorganize his thoughts.

  08

  Colony One, Mission Duration: Five Months

  Alexa found the community living of Colony One unusually difficult considering how much time she had spent in the armed forces. The mixture of people was more diverse than her normal and former circumstances, for instance. Military life, by necessity, requires conformity of all its members. She had taken that for granted when she was in the service and was now painfully aware of how different she was from everyone else.

  To dissipate her discomfort, she had taken to walking the halls and decks of the ship when she could. If she changed her route enough and kept odd hours, she could manage having the time to herself.

  Though Alexa did not particularly like being associated with the military, she could never quite shake the tell-tale things that made people mark her as a veteran. She wore her brunette hair up in a tidy bun often with her black shirt tucked in to her grey cargo pants that were tucked into her boots. It was a practical outfit and for their journey, and she couldn’t fathom any other way to be. The closest to ‘civilian looking’ she got back at home was dark blue jeans and a white v-neck t-shirt.

  As she walked the halls during a time that had been designated as night, Alexa felt a twinge of pride in herself. Despite needing the solitude, she had managed to handle herself without the aid of her most recent self-prescribed medicine; whiskey. While the first few weeks of withdrawal had been rough, she had managed and no one suspected it had been any more than an adjustment to space travel. Many others were the same – some even spending long days coughing violently as their lungs labored to repair themselves from the pollution of Earth.

  Going into the second month, there had been enough distractions to keep the demons away – learning new people’s habits, adjusting to life in space, making bets on when the Captain might start sounding less cheerful, among other things. Colony One was different enough from the places she didn’t want to be that it was easy to disassociate life on the ship from common triggers back on Earth. The hum of the ship helped her sleep, and she was surprised to find how restful it had become. Unlike the others who had arrived without dark circles under their eyes, Alexa’s sunken face was beginning to fill out.

  She was contemplating how she had managed to embrace other, healthier coping mechanisms as she rounded a corner into a section of the ship she had yet to explore. As she did, a figure jumped out from behind a support beam with a raised hand towards her.

  Alexa tensed in preparation – in a split second, she had gone from civilian solitary wanderer into combatant self-defense mode, ready to strike out to protect herself. As she grabbed the shadow by the shoulder, pulling it into better light, she stopped herself mid-strike. Her stomach wrenched uncomfortably and her grip waivered.

  It was a child – nine or ten at the most. He had his hand raised in the shape of a gun and the look of jubilance at surprising someone degraded into horror as he realized there might be retaliation for his trick. He had yelled “Boo!” but she did not hear him through her knee-jerk reaction.

  She stared at him, her grip on him iron-clad.

  “Mikhail!” A voice chided out of Alexa’s view. She looked up, and snapped out of her trance at the sight of another adult. A woman approached, clicking her tongue in reproach, “I’m sorry, Miss. He likes to run off and hide. He’s been quite the handful.” The boy’s mother explained. She stopped and seemed to notice for the first time that Alexa had a grip on her son. Alexa realized it, too, and let go abruptly, taking several steps backward.

  “It’s okay,” She finally said, blinking rapidly.

  The boy, now released, looked relieved but still petrified.

  “Are you alright…” The mother began to ask, reaching out to embrace her son as they both watched her.

  “I… I didn’t know there were children aboard,” Alexa explained, partially.

  The woman nodded, “Families were all placed together in the red section.”

  Great, Alexa thought, she knew to avoid it from now on. She nodded at the woman’s words, shared a moment of awkward eye contact and abruptly turned, leaving the befuddled mother and her son behind as she walked fast, turning around the prior corner. She walked until she was out of sight, and then started to run.

  ɸ ɸ ɸ

  Since the war of 2040, there had been only what were considered skirmishes and civil unrest until 2138. This was all there could be, because the world had united in a confederation with one military, consolidated so that there were not separate branches. One world, one army – that was the idea; there would be no one to fight.

  2138 is when the civil unrest evolved into The Confederation’s mandated war against radicals organized well enough to warrant attention. Like many wars in Earth’s history, the center of fighting was concentrated in the mid-east. This war wasn’t like preceding battles; it was no longer desert fighting. Urban conflict replaced desert battles because sand was paved with kilometers of concrete to help support the population growth the whole world was experiencing.

  The timing was unfortunate for Alexa.


  For as long as she could remember, Alexa had wanted to be a doctor. She spent all her free time as a child looking up free content on the viewer – anything that could tell her about biology, chemistry, psychology and anatomy. She took all the Confederation supplied exams and performed well. And though she was accepted into medical school, neither she nor her parents could afford it. The reality was a hard one for her to accept, and in the heat of rejection and doubts about her self-worth, she joined the military for the free training and the opportunity to practice what she loved.

  When she joined, all she had known about the war was what the media was reporting. What she had never imagined was treating the mortal wounds of her friends and fellow service members. The realization on the front lines that the media either refused to report the real story or were being severely censored in their coverage destroyed any illusions she had about the glamour of the military medical profession.

  Entire communities were devastated in the effort to quell radical activity. Fighting a war amidst rows upon rows of 40 story buildings began to prove to be impossible – danger was literally around every single corner. The struggle for dominance peaked in the first year of conflict and the Confederation responded by razing entire cities to the ground. Instead of acting as a deterrent, it seemed to only embolden and swell the ranks of radicals who were steadily losing anything they might have had a will to live for. When news leaked of the wholesale destruction of a city on the coast of the Arabian Sea, the Confederation was forced to return to putting soldiers on the ground to quell violence one block at a time.

  Alexa was often plagued with the question of how many innocent people had gotten caught up in the terrible business. She couldn’t believe that hundreds of thousands of people deserved to die for the actions of a few. Worse, it was never entirely clear what the radicals wanted, or what compelled them to fight – so she had no concept of what she, in turn, was fighting against. Popular consensus was that the radicals wanted to practice some archaic religion that involved self-mutilation and secretive cult-like gatherings. Others insisted the radicals were rebelling against government intrusion and were cutting bio-stamps out of their arms in alarming numbers.

  With little other choice, she took solace in her unit – clinging to the element of family and mutual survival. She did everything she could to support her team to give herself a solid focus. But a day came where she could no longer ignore the realities of the kind of war in which she was party to. She and her unit were in city-center of a southern region of Old Egypt. They had been entrenched for days and were running low on food and water. News came through over a secure wireless channel that a path to the west had been opened for them to move through, and with an unambiguous order to return to base immediately, they were on the move.

  They jogged in a line, the point leader clearing the gaps between buildings and the others, with Alexa in the middle, following suit. As she was clearing one gap, her eye caught something that made her hesitate. When she focused on it, she saw a child, age nine or ten, standing a few meters away in the space between the two buildings. He was a slender child with hair closely shaved to his head. He looked disproportioned in a malnourished way. He wore rags for shorts and nothing else – not even shoes. The alleyway was otherwise abandoned, scattered with rubble and filth.

  She stopped, causing the rest of her unit to stop. “Keep moving!” The point man commanded. Alexa ignored him. She couldn’t, in good conscious, leave the child.

  “Hey!” She waved with one arm while the other cradled her rifle. “Come with us,” she called out and when he didn’t move, she broke away from her group to jog towards him. His eyes were wide like he was seeing ghosts.

  “Lieutenant, stop!” she heard someone call from behind her just as she saw the boy’s arm come out from behind his back. He raised it to point a pistol squarely at her face.

  Alexa froze, her grip tightening on her rifle but could not bring herself to point it at the child. She stared at the boy in paralyzing shock. Child soldier, she registered in her mind. He is a child soldier. Taught to murder in the same way you would teach a child their alphabet.

  He pulled the trigger.

  She flinched and felt the air get sucked out of her lungs.

  The gun had jammed.

  The boy looked simultaneously frightened and angered that his attack had not worked.

  She heard the boot falls behind her, which is the only thing that snapped her out of her trance. Gunshots erupted. She was in their line of fire – she guessed they were just trying to scare the boy but a ricochet winged him. The boy went down with a scream, cupping his neck as blood poured from the wound.

  “Stop!” Alexa screamed and dropped her rifle. She fell on the boy to protect him from further assault and ripped open one of the pockets on her vest to get to a wrap of gauze. The gunfire stopped as she pulled the boy’s hands away from his neck and shoved the thick ball of gauze into the wound to help stop the bleeding. From pain, shock or both, the boy passed out.

  “The fuck do you think you’re doing, Lieutenant?” The group leader asked as they circled with their backs to her and the fallen pair to guard against any potential ambushes.

  “He’s just a boy!” Alexa exclaimed as she frantically checked the wound. To her brief relief, the ricochet did not seem to hit anything vital. “We cannot leave him.” She said forcefully.

  “He tried to kill you!” He shouted the obvious.

  There were tears in Alexa’s eyes, “He doesn’t know any better,” she said, trying to wrap the wound tightly with shaking hands. She struggled to get to the back side of his neck, fumbling a few times before she was joined by one of her unit. James Hunter had released his rifle so it hung at his side, and helped lift the boy so the wound could be dressed.

  “I’ll carry him,” James told her in a soft voice.

  “I can do it.” Alexa insisted, and with a reluctant sniffle, wiped her face on her sleeve to clear the tears from her eyes.

  The boy had lived and was successfully rehabilitated, but Alexa was never the same. She knew for every child saved from that despicable environment – which were far too few – there were countless more. Saving child soldiers was not even an objective of the Confederation and no one outside the military knew about them, so no one could care. The military made all members sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding speaking out about anything they had seen or done while in the service, and it carried severe penalties.

  It was an impossible burden everyone who fought in the war brought home – especially those forced to defend themselves against the child soldiers. Those who witnessed horrors worse than she had were simply not able to cope with the moral injury.

  ɸ ɸ ɸ

  The unexpected encounter with the boy on Colony One triggered a thousand different emotions in Alexa and the only thing that made sense in the moment was to run. She knew the futility of it – she was literally trapped in a metal container rocketing through space. There was no escape. The thought of escape was always an illusion, even when she had been back on Earth. In that very moment on the ship, running felt like control. She focused on the burn in her legs until she couldn’t take it any longer. When she finally stopped, it was on a walkway overlooking an open space below. She braced her forearms on the railing and hunched over with labored breathing.

  She felt her hands begin to shake and it didn’t take long for her to fall back on old urges. After catching her breath, she stood tall and walked with purpose back to the purple section. She stepped quietly when she entered as most of the compartment was sleeping and made a b-line for her bunk. It only took a few seconds before the fifth of unopened whiskey was in her grip. She pocketed it quickly and turned to leave the way she came.

  She stopped abruptly when she saw Anivashak standing in the doorway. His hands were folded behind him and his gaze somehow knowing.

  “Mind if I join you?” He asked in his ever-calm voice.

  “I’d rather be alone right now,�
� Alexa declined and tried to go around him.

  “I’ll share,” the man produced a bottle of honey wine that he had been holding behind his back.

  Alexa wore her shock openly, “You drink?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “Is that a yes?” He wondered with half closed eyes and a smile.

  “I… I guess…” Alexa was intrigued, which made her temporarily forget about her anxiety.

  He nodded and stepped out of her path so she could lead the way. They found a secluded area, tucked away from any main passageways. In the alcove, there was a small round window that looked out and into a field of stars – there were many like it distributed throughout the ship. The biggest of these portals was on an observation deck just above the mammoth’s ships bulwark, where COLONY ONE was painted. Alexa rarely visited that section as it was so popular that passengers oftentimes had to take turns looking out the larger than life picturesque window.

  They sat on the floor facing each other with the tiny opening to the stars between them.

  “Have you ever tried any of the hard stuff?” Alexa wondered, twisting off the cap to her whiskey.

  “Once or twice,” Anivashak admitted. He uncorked the wine and they exchanged bottles to take the first drink. Anivashak’s face turned bright red immediately and his smile deepened.

  Alexa took two or three more sips of the wine before she felt the warmth start to hit her. “So,” she handed the bottle back. “Why do they call you Bob?” This was something that Alexa had wanted to know since she met the man. Many of her shipmates called the monk Bob, and she had remained baffled as to why.

  “It is easier to say than Anivashak,” he explained.

  “So is Ani,” Alexa pointed out.

  “That does not get as many laughs.” Anivashak grinned.