Colonial Prime_Humanity

by Kevin L. Nielsen

  “Tell her I’m coming, Ace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As much as Jaelyn wanted to, he didn’t drag his feet or slow his pace at all. It wouldn’t do him any good. He reached the door to their quarters in just a few minutes and paused before entering the room. He was in for a long night. He half contemplated just turning around and heading back to the gardens, but didn’t allow it to gain any real purchase in his mind. Being the captain’s son came with certain responsibilities, not the least of which was just being the captain’s son.

  With a sigh, he stepped forward and the door slid open.

  Their rooms were, if Jaelyn was honest with himself, rather nice. The entire far wall was made of DuraGlass, giving them an amazing view of the blackness of vacuum space outside. Granted, there were stars and other celestial bodies out there, but Jaelyn had spent his entire life in ships such as this. Even breathtaking beauty got old when it was one’s day to day sustenance. Perhaps that’s why he liked the gardens so much. Every day the plants changed; flowers bloomed, trees grew, the leaves shifted between colors of green and red and gold. Life was constantly in motion.

  A few padded chairs sat around a table in one corner of the room next to some cabinets, and a small kitchenette was set into the wall. The heating coils of the stovetop lay hidden within the stove itself, though they were far more efficient than any of the old stoves he’d seen in videos. They could heat a gallon of water to a rolling boil in less than two minutes. That could have been an effect of being in space, rather than efficiency of heat transfer, but Jaelyn really didn’t care. They wouldn’t use it much. The captain ate in the mess along with everyone else. That meant Jaelyn would as well.

  The rest of the room was rather spartan. A low couch-like bit of furniture lay against the DuraGlass wall, but it looked as comfortable as any of the military furniture he’d been familiar with on other ships, which is to say, not at all.

  His mother stood in the center of the room wearing a pair of tight-fitting leggings and a sports bra, standing perfectly still as if she’d been waiting for him. He was sure she had.

  “I expect you here by 21:00 every evening,” she said without preamble. “21-22:00 we will practice our regular routine as we always do. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jaelyn made sure to keep his voice level, though he was sure some measure of his frustration made a small burr in his tone. He’d hoped this mission, this voyage, would be different than the other posts. That he and his mother could grow closer to being a normal family. Apparently, that hope was as empty as the vast recesses of space.

  His mother raised an eyebrow. “No argument?”

  “Would there be any point to it?” He slipped out of his shoes and rolled up his sleeves, taking a position on the floor next to his mother, but with enough space between them that they wouldn’t get in each other’s way.

  “You know this is for your own good. You’ll thank me for this later.”

  Jaelyn didn’t respond. A moment later, the music started and Jaelyn slipped into a modified capoeira stance, moving with the time of the music through the motions he’d been practicing every day of his life for as long as he could remember. Beside him, his mother did the same.

  “Thank you.” Jaelyn hadn’t realized he’d spoken until the moment just before his mother replied.

  “For?”

  “Letting me apprentice under Dr. Martin,” he said between calm steady breaths and the interweaving motion of his hands. It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, any of it, but the words came anyway. Why did his mother have that effect on him? He could be frustrated with her one minute and thanking her the next. “She didn’t say anything, but I know she would have cleared it with you before offering me the spot.”

  “I do love you, you know, even if I’ll never understand your fascination with plants and dirt.”

  Jaelyn didn’t say anything for a long while. Part of it was because he’d entered a complicated sequence which involved every part of his body and most of his concentration. Part of it was simple doubt and confusion. He’d lost count of how many times he’d wondered if his mother loved her career more than him. Frankly, when she’d informed him they were going on this voyage and leaving everything they’d ever known behind, he’d questioned it most strongly.

  But there’d been a small part of him, a small child’s voice that hoped it would be a time when he and his mother could grow closer again, like they used to be. Back when Jaelyn’s personal memories were still shadowed by time and how young he was when those memories were formed. Back before he knew why his mother was so devoted to her career or understood why he’d never known his father. Back before he’d learned about the ugly side of humanity and that he’d been conceived while his mother had been in a POW camp back on Earth. A simpler time. A happier time.

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  Nathan shimmied forward in the service tunnel, wriggling forward with a quick twist of his shoulders and buttocks together at the same time. If someone were behind him, or watching him on one of the service cameras, Nathan was sure they were laughing their heads off right about now. It was an undignified thing for an XO to do, he was sure, but he’d go to hell and back before letting something he could fix go unrepaired simply because the crewman assigned had no idea what he was doing.

  “There you are, you little motherless goat,” Nathan swore, reaching the panel he was trying to get to.

  He pulled the paneling loose, exposing the wires, circuits, and piping inside the wall itself. The engines hadn’t been performing at peak efficiency over the last week or two. They didn’t use the engines often, allowing their momentum to carry them forward without wasting fuel. The only time the engines were engaged was to correct their course, which was done mostly by the ship’s internal navigation computers. Still, the issue was a simple one to fix, for Nathan at least.

  With a few deft motions, he pulled a couple wires free, not even feeling the tingling pulse of electricity running within them, and then reattached them in a different order, slipping a miniscule resistor onto one of the wires before he did so. With the wires reattached, a few small alarm bells started sounding. The power wasn’t routing correctly, but that was readily fixed. He placed his palm against the circuit board, holding it flat on the surface. The board shifted beneath his palm, circuit pathways rerouting of their own volition.

  The alarms stopped.

  Sighing, Nathan popped the panel back onto the wall and did his best to ignore his trembling hands. It was an aftereffect of his ability, one which he’d never fully gotten used to. Not that he’d ever really known what his ability was either. He didn’t speak to others about it, nor advertise it. Still, those few who did know thought him a freak. It was, well, it was the real reason he’d come on this one-way trip. He was tired of his father’s judgmental looks, his fear. Here aboard this ship, no one knew, not even Amara, despite what she’d become to him over the last nine months, Earth time. All they knew was that he had a knack for knowing how to fix just about any machine aboard ship, which was, after all, a useful if odd thing for an XO to be able to do.

  After a moment, the shaking subsided and he shimmied back out of the service tunnel and into the engine room.

  “All set, Chief,” Nathan said as he slid out onto the floor. “It should be working perfectly now.”

  Chief Engineer Li gave him a level look as he glanced up from his datapad. Nathan didn’t doubt the datapad was already showing an increased output of at least 25%. He also knew it was technically impossible, according to the Fleet specifications of the capacities of this type of craft, but it was still true either way.

  “Right, sir. That it is.” Li said looking down at his datapad and then back up at Nathan. “Um, how’d you do that?”

  Nathan grinned and shrugged. “Just gave it a good kick.”

  The wiry engineer snorted. “Right, sir. Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll figure it out. Just give me a couple weeks.” He ran a hand along his balding
pate and looked down at his datapad again. “Or months. We’ve got time.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Nathan said, brushing off his uniform. “I’ll see you at the staff meeting later, Chief.”

  Li nodded and snapped a quick salute, which Nathan returned. Li would stew over what he’d done for weeks before admitting defeat. It was a fun little game they played, one which allowed Nathan a much-needed respite from the strain of dealing with the million-and-one things under his jurisdiction aboard Colonial Prime. Not to mention the growing tension between certain factions aboard ship.

  Nathan strode through the long corridors, saluting at passing crewmembers or nodding to passengers. He had some security concerns to deal with first, then a shift in the Command Bubble, which would basically mean staring out into space for a couple hours with nothing to do but maintain appearances. Still, it was better than it could have been. He still had engineering to distract him when the need arose, among other things.

  Nathan smiled slightly and picked up his pace.

  The food in the mess, Jaelyn decided, wasn’t any better nine months into the voyage than it had been when they’d first set off. Granted, some of it was better now that they could supplement it with fresh produce from the gardens, but Jaelyn preferred most of it raw and freshly picked rather than cooked and swimming in sauces like the cooks prepared it. Still, Jaelyn ate with as much of a smile on his face as he could muster to keep up appearances, though he sat alone at a table in a corner of the mess, often ignored by both the crew and passengers of their ship.

  Jaelyn pushed his “stir fry” back and forth on his plate with his fork for a moment, then took the time to look up at the room around him, more in an effort to put off having to eat the stuff than out of any real desire to look around. This room never changed.

  At almost three hundred meters long and a dozen tall, it was the largest single space not designated as a “cargo area” within the ship. Metal tables and benches that had been bolted to the ground during takeoff months ago and which were now free of those restraints, covered the majority of the area, though there were two areas where a wide swath of the floor was open, except for some more portable chairs. One of those areas was behind a long bar that rested in the corner of the room closest to Jaelyn.

  His mother had insisted on the addition of the bar as a means whereby people could mingle and fraternize that was somewhat more casual than the regular mess area. Jaelyn wasn’t sure it was really needed, even if he’d been inclined to drink. As with most locations where food was served, the mess was always a hub of people coming and going or else lingering long into the wee hours of the night nursing a cup of coffee or other beverage. Eventually those supplies would run out, but the cargo holds of the ship were still bulging with storage at this point and there were coffee plants growing down in the gardens ― a hybrid version, at least, one that should last the voyage and be hardy enough to take on the climate of P3X11A, the planet that would become their new home.

  The other open area was in front of the kitchen itself and the long counter for the actual serving of food that sat in front of it. Jaelyn couldn’t remember ever seeing it without at least a small line of hungry folk there, either serving themselves or being served by the kitchen staff. At the moment, a dozen or so people were serving themselves. Another forty or so sat at tables throughout the room, most clustered into small groups of less than a dozen at a handful of tables about as far from one another as they could get.

  Now that he noticed, Jaelyn watched with growing curiosity as one of the people in line at the serving station finished and moved toward the seating area. The man, a tall, lanky fellow with flaming red hair, avoided the first table with people at it, and headed straight for the second. The people there saw him coming and waved him over. It was…

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  Jaelyn jumped and spun his head around so fast his neck popped. Dr. Martin chuckled as she sat down next to him. She set a glass of an amber-colored liquid on the table before her. She must have come in through the door by the bar.

  “Alright there, Jaelyn?”

  “If I can get my heart rate under control, sure. Were you trying to kill me?” Jaelyn made a show of holding a hand over his heart, breathing heavily in an equally exaggerated fashion.

  “If I were trying to kill you, you’d already be dead. You were so lost in your own little world just now I could have brought an army in here and surrounded you before you would’ve even noticed.”

  Jaelyn looked down at his plate and covered his growing flush by taking a quick bite of soggy vegetables. Dr. Martin chuckled softly, a quiet sounding thing that Jaelyn had come to find rather comforting over the last nine months as her senior apprentice, and took a drink from her glass.

  “What had you so wrapped up in thought that you missed my grand entrance?” she asked when Jaelyn had finished swallowing.

  Jaelyn shrugged and took another bite of the now fast-disappearing stir fry. Dr. Martin gave him a level look over the top of her glass. Over the last year, Jaelyn had come to recognize that expression as the one that came just before she pressed an issue. He raised a hand to forestall her and swallowed.

  “I was watching the other people sit down,” Jaelyn said in a voice that got quieter toward the end.

  “Ah, people watching. A worthy pastime. I’m guilty of it myself from time to time. Great way to learn.” Dr. Martin took another drink and frowned down at her glass, which was now empty.

  “Great way to…what? I was…well, what?”

  Dr. Martin smiled, and to Jaelyn the expression was halfway between a grin of amusement and rueful consternation.

  “Our world isn’t shaped by our environment, Jaelyn, it’s shaped by the people around us,” she said, putting the glass down on the table again. “We learn by observation.” Dr. Martin wiped her mouth with one hand and then pursed her lips, meeting his eye. Jaelyn recognized the thoughtful expression as the one she wore when she was about to give him a lecture of some sort.

  “If you were to see a plant leaning to one side,” she continued, “the stalk permanently bent, what would that tell you?”

  “It was competing for sunlight as it grew.”

  “Precisely. And if you saw a tree with an oddly formed knot, what would you assume happened?”

  “Some sort of aberration was on the tree or branch as it grew. But what – ”

  Dr. Martin held up a hand, cutting him off. “And when you’re looking at tree rings, what do they tell you?”

  Jaelyn frowned. “Lots of things. The level of wetness in the environment during that growing period, the harshness or lightness of a given winter, floods, weather, any number of things, even whether or not fire or bugs had gotten to it.”

  “Right. You learn about the natural world and the plants with which we work by observing them. The same is true of people, though it’s much more complicated than with plants.” Dr. Martin held up her hands. “Look at my hands. What do you see?”

  He’d seen them before, obviously, but he looked at them again, this time with purposeful intent, humoring her.

  “They’re hard and calloused,” he said. “You’ve got scars on several fingers and across your left palm. You’ve never been married, or it was long enough ago that any calluses from rings have faded. There’s dirt under your nails.”

  Dr. Martin gave him a flat smile. “And what does that tell you about me?”

  It was Jaelyn’s turn to give her a flat look. “It means you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.”

  “And?”

  “And…” What more did she want? “I’m not sure what else you’re looking for.”

  “It tells you I’ve devoted myself to that life. I don’t care about other people knowing what I do, or I’d scrub under my nails. I prefer solitude to company. I’m what people would call ‘strange’. Understand?”

  Jaelyn nodded, recognizing how she was extrapolating on the information he’d provided.


  She nodded. “Good enough.” She gestured out at the other tables, taking in the room. “What does watching them teach you?”

  Jaelyn looked out at the other tables again. Most of the people who’d been at the serving station had taken seats at one of the occupied tables. A few had taken seats together at a new table. He looked from table to table, trying to puzzle out what Dr. Martin was getting at.

  “Um,” he said, “I’m honestly not sure.”

  Dr. Martin snorted. “That’s the coward’s way out. Try again.”

  Jaelyn grumbled, though he’d half expected the response. Dr. Martin and his mother differed in any number of ways, but neither of them believed in making anything easy. Most of the time Jaelyn was fine with that. Sometimes, though, they should at least try to make something simpler for him, shouldn’t they? For the sake of fairness?

  “Well,” Jaelyn said, buying himself more time, “they separated themselves into groups almost immediately. They all seem to know exactly where it is they need to go.”

  “Go on.”

  “Um, they don’t interact with each other much. If they were plants, I’d say they don’t cross-pollinate well, or at all.” Jaelyn glanced back at Dr. Martin in time to see her nod.

  “Right. That’s it precisely. There’s no interaction between them. What you’re witnessing here is a direct aftermath of the war back on Earth.”

  Jaelyn frowned. “How can you tell? I thought we left all that behind.”

  “Not hardly.” Dr. Martin picked up her empty glass and peered down into it, as if she were trying to find some hidden measure of its contents she hadn’t already consumed. “How can I tell? It’s right there before you. Watch how that redheaded fellow refuses to turn his back to the other table there.” Dr. Martin gestured at one of the tables with the hand holding the empty glass, without looking up. “Look at the distance between occupied tables and the way each group interacts with the other members of the group. See that man there?” She pointed at a man that was walking back to one of the tables from the serving station holding a salt shaker. “He spilled his salt shaker a few minutes ago. He could have just gone to one of the other tables and asked to use theirs, but he didn’t. He walked by two other occupied tables to go get a new salt shaker. There’s no trust there.”