by Rick Partlow
I grinned at the Fleet officer's wide-eyed stare and stood, grabbing my plasma gun from the top of the empty cargo container.
"That's my chain of command now," I told him dryly, heading off across the packed dirt.
Loose particles of gravel and dry grass pelted me as the belly jets spun down with a plaintive whine, but I could see that the ramp was already lowering. When Mat and Reggie stepped down, I knew the ship was the Nightshade; when Deke exited the ship behind them, I knew where they were coming in from.
"I know you said you'd find a ride back," I told Deke, grinning, "but I didn't know you'd bring company."
I stopped smiling when I saw the looks on their faces. Mat's was grim and gloomy, but then it always had been, especially since Daniela died. Reggie's was thoughtful, which was scary given that it was Reggie. And Deke...Deke I knew better than the two of them, and he had an expression that was a mixture of sadness, relief and disbelief.
"What?" I asked, looking between the three of them. "What's going on?"
"Brian bought it," Reggie told me bluntly. "He and Holly and Cowboy and Kel were leading incursions into the Imperial Palace and they ran into four Guard cyborgs. Probably all that were left after the one you killed in the reactor."
"Shit," I hissed, the breath going out of me. Brian and I had never been close, not ever what I would call friends, but he was one of us. And now we were only seven... "Is Holly okay?"
"She's banged up, but she'll survive," Deke told me, speaking up quickly because he knew I'd be concerned about her. "But that's not all, bud." Something tugged at his mouth, like he would have smiled if not for what had happened to Brian.
"The Tahni Emperor is dead," Mat declared, speaking for the first time. His face was a stone statue, but his voice sounded exhausted, and I thought he would have been staggering if it were in his nature. "His senior ministers and generals have been captured and issued a general surrender that they broadcast to their troops insystem and through the jumpgates. It'll take a little while to disseminate to their forces in other star systems but..."
"The war's over," Reggie said, smiling now despite everything. "The war is fucking over!"
He'd yelled that, pumping a fist in exultation, and I saw Fleet techs all around the landing field and the supply depot looking at us, at him, disbelief strong on their faces, wondering if they'd heard what they thought they'd heard.
I knew how they felt. A numbness spread through my chest and head. Eight years. I'd spent the last eight years fighting this war or getting ready to fight it, learning lessons that would help me fight it. Eight fucking years. I'd been a teenager. Now I was twenty-six.
I blinked away shock and saw the feeling mirrored in Deke's expression.
"I know," he said, shaking his head in wonder. "What the hell are we gonna' do now?"
Chapter Thirty-Four
I shrugged my duffle bag over my shoulder and stepped down the ramp of the shuttle, still unable to tear my eyes away from the sight of Harristown. I'd left it in ruins two years ago, and now...now I didn't recognize it. I'd used to think it was The City, before I'd come to realize it was barely a small, colony town. Now it was a city. Multistory office buildings stood gleaming in the light of the Day, replacing the generation-old businesses and townhouses that had burned to ashes deep in the Night.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
I turned to look at the woman who’d spoken. She was tall and slender, with an angular, severe face and dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she was dressed in expertly-tailored business wear. I recognized her as one of the passengers who’d boarded the shuttle at the new Corporate Council orbital station where the freighter that had brought me home from Inferno had docked. The station was a gigantic gravitational wheel rotating around the hub of the spacedock, and they’d been using it as a construction shack to build something big from material brought in out of the asteroid belt.
“Yes,” I agreed, trying to keep the trepidation out of my voice. “But what’s it all for?”
“Housing and offices for the iridium mines out in the mountains,” she said, smiling with a pride of ownership that told me she’d been involved in the construction. “There’s an amazingly rich vein out there, richer than you’d find in most asteroid fields. Makes it worthwhile to mine it in a gravity well.”
I nodded, looking at the city instead of her to hide my troubled frown.
“I’m surprised the Elders agreed to it,” I said.
“Well, they didn’t have much choice,” the woman pointed out with a chuckle. “There was the war, after all.”
Now I did glance at her. I was wearing my uniform, mostly because I didn’t have much in the way of civilian clothes.
“War’s over,” I said.
“Yet we’re still here.” Another grin, this one less pleasant. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
I left her with a polite nod, pacing off across the field toward a grassy lot where I saw a half dozen hoppers parked. I’d thought Pete or Rachel would be picking me up; instead, I saw someone I hadn’t at all expected. Standing next to a beat-up and patched junker with panels of various colors and shades slapped together over its hull, was a homely looking woman with chocolate skin and auburn hair crammed under a straw hat, her coveralls still ratty and stained.
“Oh, my God,” I said with an unabashed laugh, running up to her. “Cathy Glennon!” I offered her my hand but she pulled me into a hug instead, pounding me on the back. “I should have known you were too tough for the damn Tahni to kill.”
“Thanks to you,” she said, baring teeth at me in what passed for a smile for her. “I was rotting away in one of those fucking work camps before you came along, Cal. When Rachel told me you were coming in today, there wasn’t any way I’d let anyone else give you a ride home.” She jerked a thumb at the hopper’s open canopy. “Throw your shit inside and let’s get you out of this dump.”
“What?” I asked, tossing my duffle bag into one seat then clambering into the one next to it. “You don’t like what they’re doing to the city?”
“Fucking suits are gonna’ ruin this place,” she grumbled, yanking the canopy closed, then slamming it again when it refused to latch right the first time. “Tearing up the damn mountains with that mine.” She was hitting a series of controls as she spoke and the hopper’s fans began to spin up with a shrieking whine, underscored by tiny scraping coughs where the bearings needed replacing. “And you know what they’re talking about now?”
“What?” I asked, and my voice broke slightly as she jerked the stick and fed power to the fans, kicking us into the air abruptly.
“Fucking solar reflectors!” She told me, fairly spitting the words, turning back so I could hear her despite the fact that it meant looking away from the direction we were flying. “The damn suits don’t like the Night, guess it’s bad for the psychology of their imported workers, so they want to give us a bunch of half-assed days on an Earth schedule.”
“Shit,” I muttered. That sounded disturbing…then again, I’d been working on an Earth schedule for eight years now.
“Ah, the hell with all that,” Cathy waved the subject away. “How was your flight?”
“Long,” I said, letting out an exasperated breath. “I thought I’d never get here.”
“Why the hell did it take the Fleet so long to let you go?” She demanded. “War’s been over for almost six months now!”
“The military moves slow,” I said, shrugging.
I didn’t feel like going into the real reason: it had taken Colonel Murdock nearly three months to talk Admiral Sato and President Jameson into letting us out at all. We represented a sizable investment and a lot of people wanted us on the payroll and in the arsenal in perpetuity. I think it had helped that Mat and Holly had decided to stay in the service, so they didn’t lose everyone.
“Well, you’re back now,” she said cheerfully, mercurial as always. “And I know a bunch of people will be happy to see you! Especially Rachel!
” She brayed a laugh. “That woman is practically peeing her pants waiting for you!”
I shook my head, trying not to blush. Whatever else the war had done to this place, it hadn’t changed Cathy Glennon one bit.
***
“Why are we landing here?” I asked Cathy, frowning at the road junction as we descended towards it. We were still in the middle of the Old Growth forest, a couple kilometers from my family’s property.
“I just do what I’m told,” she said with a shrug, popping the canopy.
I was about to object, but I heard the car approaching, and I suspected something was up, so I just grabbed my bag and climbed out of the battered old machine.
“Welcome back, Caleb,” I heard Cathy yell as the canopy closed. She was in the air before the groundcar came within sight.
It was an open-top utility vehicle, common enough for the larger farmers back before the war; it seated six but this one carried only the driver. Rachel looked much different than she had when I’d left her here two years ago, but that was no surprise: I’d exchanged video messages with her as recently as a month ago. Her face had the fresh tan of the Day, her hair was long and unbound and sun-kissed and the smile on her face was less burdened by grief and loss.
I stepped to the driver's side as she stopped the car, and barely waited until she'd let loose her safety restraint before I pulled her out and into my arms. It had been nearly two years since I'd touched her and the warmth of her burned against my skin. Her mouth found mine and for a very long time, there were no words. There didn't need to be; all the words had been said.
Finally, when we could bear to let each other go, I slid into the passenger's seat, tossing my bag into the back, and she spun the car around and headed for home.
"Why did I have to meet you out here?" I asked her. "Cathy could have flown me right to the property."
"You'll see," she told me, something close to a smirk on her face.
It didn't take long. Once we cleared the Old Growth, you could see all the way across the fields. The barn was back up, which wasn't too surprising; it was a simple structure, mostly corrugated aluminum, and could have been thrown up in a few days by construction 'bots or even by hand if you had the people available. More heartening was seeing the autoharvesters moving across the fields of grain, doing their work in stolid silence, the way they always had. Some things kept going, despite all the death and tragedy.
Then I saw the house and I think my mouth dropped open. I knew Rachel and Pete had been working on getting something built for us to live in, something better than the buildfoam huts the Fleet Engineers had left behind for the refugees, but they'd been reticent about showing me any pictures or sharing any details. Now I knew why.
The house was our house, the Mitchell house, rebuilt to the last brick, rebuilt by hand. Every last detail, every last color and texture was the same as I remembered. I turned to Rachel, shaking my head in amazement.
"How the hell did you and Pete...?" I trailed off, words failing me.
"It wasn't just us," Rachel told me, her right hand gripping mine tightly as the other controlled the wheel. "It was everyone who was left, all your family's friends, all that was left of the Elders, the people we saved from the work camps. They all pitched in when they could."
I blinked back tears, throat too constricted to talk. Rachel noticed and slipped her arm around mine, pulling my head onto her shoulder.
"They just wanted a way to thank you," she said quietly.
The front door swung open as she pulled the car up, and Pete stepped out. He'd cut his hair short and shaved off his peach fuzz, and it looked like he'd actually grown a couple centimeters and filled out across the shoulders since I'd last seen him. In that moment, he looked a lot like Dad. Then his face split in a huge grin and the resemblance ended. I jumped out and pulled him into a hug, laughing and pounding him on the back and saying inane and pointless words that could never convey as much emotion as the laughing and the hugging.
One of the disadvantages of having the sort of augmentation I'd received was that I was very hard to surprise. I knew there were two other people inside the house before they stepped out, and I knew exactly who they were; that didn't lessen the pleasure I felt from them being there. I hadn't seen Jason Chen since that day on Inferno when we'd planned our rogue operation together, risking my life and his career.
I'd escaped with my life, but Jason hadn't been as lucky with his career. Thanks to Colonel Murdock's intervention---and the fact that we'd won---he'd avoided a court-martial, but they'd discharged him just about the minute the war ended. He'd been back on Canaan for months now, and you could see it in the length of his hair and his plain, workman's clothes. And by the fact that he and Lisa Stanfell were married now. She was with him, running out to greet me with a bubbling giggle, just as happy and girlish as when we were teenagers. You almost couldn't tell she'd spent months in a Tahni work camp...until you looked closely at the pinched lines around her eyes and mouth and the strands of grey in her hair that she hadn’t bothered to color.
"Took you long enough," Jason cracked, turning my attempted handshake into a warm embrace that his new wife joined. "I was getting tired of having to help these two keep this place up, so it's a damn good thing you decided to come back and take up the slack."
"Jason Chen working on a farm,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. “There really is a God."
“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it,” he warned, “I don’t plan on taking up the shitkicker life.”
“What?” I asked, looking between him and Lisa. “You have another job lined up already?”
"That's kind of why we're here, other than to say hello and welcome you back," Jason admitted with a shrug. "I've been talking to what's left of the Council of Elders and Chief Justice MacLeod." Reina MacLeod, I knew, had been the only justice of the Church Court who'd survived the Tahni occupation, despite spending months in an interrogation cell. She was one tough lady. "And they want to make you a job offer."
"What?" I asked, half-curious and half-amused. "They need a groundskeeper for the Harristown Recreational Center?"
They all exchanged a look before Jason went on, and now I was getting suspicious.
"Things have been a bit disorganized since the military pulled out a few months ago, and the civilian government took back over," he explained. "And there are a few positions that haven't been filled yet. Including Constable."
It took me a moment before the implications of what he was saying sank in.
"Me?" I asked, eyes narrowing dubiously. "They want me to be the Planetary Constable?"
"I know," Jason commiserated, shaking his head in disbelief. "I couldn't believe they didn't offer me the job instead, but what can you do? I'm an Offworlder and life ain't fair..."
"Are you fucking serious?" I demanded. I looked between all of them, still suspicious. Rachel and Lisa were laughing and I wondered how ridiculous I looked.
"We're so serious," Pete spoke up, "that the two of us," he motioned to himself and Jason, "already volunteered to be your first two deputies."
I had to laugh at that. It was surreal. Me as the chief cop on the planet?
"Hey, just think about it," Jason said, clapping me on the shoulder. "We're gonna' take off and let you two have some alone time." He gave Pete a meaningful look.
"Oh, right," Pete agreed, catching on. He followed them as they moved off the porch towards the car. "There's a dinner in your honor in Harristown later...Rachel'll tell you about it."
I waved as the three of them drove away in the utility vehicle. I idly wondered if it was theirs or ours, and reflected with a glow of contentment that it really didn't matter.
"So," I asked Rachel when it was just the two of us, "you think I should take the job?"
She slipped into my arms and rested her head on my chest and I drank in the feel of her, the warmth of a sun that would never go down. Then she took my hand and gave me a look that banished other matters from my thoug
hts.
"I think," she said, pulling me gently into the house, "that we can talk about it later."
I smiled and followed her, closing the door behind us.
It was good to be home.
Read the further adventures of Caleb Mitchell in the star-spanning space opera trilogy:
Birthright
Chapter One
TCN News Instell Report, Dateline: 12 November, 2,271, Commonwealth Standard.
Reports continue to trickle in from the Aphrodite colony of an armed uprising by the so-called Predecessor Cultists, who profess to be preparing humanity for the return of the Predecessors, or Ancients: the mysterious race whom many believe is responsible for the construction of the Martian Face and whose relics have been found at sites on a handful of worlds throughout the Cluster. Speculation on the nature of the Ancients has continued since the discovery in the early Twenty-Second Century of the map of the wormhole jumplinks carved into the side of the Edge Mountain on Hermes, which spurred the initial phase of interstellar colonization. Though no physical remains or pictorial representations of the Predecessors have been discovered, these cults insist that they were humanoids who were responsible for genetically engineering and “seeding" the races of our cluster, who created the jumplinks for our use as a kind of birthright and who will someday return from their self-imposed exile to judge the progress of us, their "children."
Cultists on Aphrodite have reportedly armed themselves with military weapons and attempted to take over communication facilities, just the latest in a chain of violence which has included riots on Earth in Capital City and New Bombay. On dozens of Commonwealth colonies, however, and on Earth itself, the Predecessor Cults continue to grow in popularity, particularly among young adults and disaffected veterans of the War with the Tahni. Though Commonwealth sources refuse to comment, it is rumored that the Criminal Investigations Division of the Patrol Service is working in conjunction with planetary constabularies to crack down on the cultists...