And All The Stars A Grave.

by Greg Curtis

  But apparently that was only the beginning of the sins that had been committed against him. He also hadn’t been tried in absentia as he’d assumed. He hadn’t been tried at all, since if he had, the first thing that would have come out was that he’d already been tried, sentenced and served his term. The next would have been that fifty years on a penal colony was above that which the law could prescribe for the crime, while he would have been required to have some form of legal counsel defending him. And finally, he would have been given a chance to speak, and to hear the witnesses. What had been done was a farce pure and simple. There had been no trial, just someone having a little fun at his expense.

  The next sin was that he hadn’t been sent to a prescribed penal planet. Erewhon as he’d named it, referring to an old earth novel he’d once read, was simply a once explored planet that had been put aside as useless for any of the great races to colonise, ever. Its life forms were simply incompatible with any others. Poisonous to him and others. And its air wasn’t much better. It had several dangerous toxins in it which had been slowly poisoning him. Still, as a human he was lucky. Apparently they were much more deadly to the other races.

  Perhaps though, the first two matters could somehow have been written off as some form of bizarre bureaucratic bungle, but there was still one more matter that could never be written off as an accident. The transport he’d been sent in had had vital systems removed. Food and water supplies were missing, there was no med bag, no toiletries, no clothes, and perhaps most damning of all, no com unit. Even a condemned man had a right to speak with his family from time to time, or his representative. Worse still from the Force’s perspective, the transport couldn’t be communicated with. It didn’t even have a signal marker to give its position to other ships, a fundamental breech of space law. Even a life pod had that.

  The conclusion was inescapable. Someone or more likely several some ones had tried to kill him. And they’d tried to do it in such a way that it would look like some terrible bureaucratic mix up. An innocent mistake, at least to his people if they ever learned of it.

  If it wasn’t for one single piece of luck, it would have worked too, and no one would ever have known the truth. But the transport had passed too close to another ship and failed to give a response, a serious breach of space law. But for that chance encounter, he would never have been found, and the truth never known. As it was, that ship had reported it as it was required to do, and from there a course had been able to be plotted.

  Putting the fact of a prison transport with no signal transmitter heading to an unknown destination, together with the fact that he had been seen being brought to the courthouse and then carried unconscious and naked to the transport field, and the Force had quickly realised he was on the ship. And not voluntarily.

  From that point a major investigation had been launched, while the Targ’s two mini-warships had been sent off in pursuit of the errant craft. The Targ itself was still in no condition to give chase. But finding a tiny transport that wasn’t sending out any signals with only a rough course to follow, meant that it would take time. But at least they’d thought he would be able to survive until they found him.

  The lack of even basic survival fittings in the transport meant that he was lucky to be alive. Very lucky. Eking out his rations could have given him another week, two at best, but had he turned more to native foods he wouldn’t have survived even that long. As she kept telling him that, for the first time Daryl had a slight hope that Karen might actually have some real feelings for him. It was in the way she kept telling him how lucky he was to be alive, that he understood she was grateful for his survival. And that was a cheery thought for someone who was stuck in an alien universe with little hope of returning home. Especially someone who’d just survived an attempted murder.

  The moment he’d been picked up and they saw the transport, the investigation had been upgraded, from abduction, to attempted murder. No prison transport in existence was without the basics for survival. Air, food, water, medicine, and warmth. Every prison transport had renewable systems to provide them. So had his, originally. They hadn’t been left out by accident. Someone had deliberately removed them. Someone had also reprogrammed the computer giving it a new destination, and turned off the beacon.

  The transport was currently in the Ocelot’s hold, awaiting a return to Unity where some detailed examinations would be carried out. Top of the list was finding out who had altered it.

  It seemed a strange way to kill someone. Although seemingly a reasonably certain method, - after all, only dumb luck had saved him - it was still slow and risky. At every step along the way it could all have gone wrong for the murderer, and worse he, or she, could have been caught. A bomb or some form of booby trap would have seemed much more intelligent to him. Although, as Karen pointed out, such things would have been detected very quickly and could never have been considered bureaucratic bungles.

  Actually Daryl’s main gripe with the whole affair was that he couldn’t blame his two favourite villains. Helos was still locked up. And Li had headed directly from the Targ to his lab at Unity Prime the day they arrived and had not returned.

  The suspect list that Karen could give him was quite short. It began with a group who called themselves Justice. Almost totally comprised of Edenites, they had only one goal, and that was to call his people to account for their crimes. As such they’d become a political force in the Community, with a voice larger than their size would suggest, and they’d also carried out some political stunts. Things like draping the human embassy in blood. In secret of course, since the humans couldn’t know they existed, which rather defeated the purpose of the act and left the embassy staff confused.

  Yet to Daryl as an enemy they made little sense. To begin with they sounded more like activists than murderers, and then, while he could well understand that they didn’t like him, they were in a strange way on the same side. He wanted his people to answer the charges as well and his actions surely showed that much at least. On the other hand, while he saw it that way, he realised that they might see it differently. Perhaps to them, he was an enemy. Someone stirring up trouble, perhaps even trying to shift the blame away from the Earth. But even if that was the case, he had to ask himself, did they have the clout to pull off such a stunt?

  The only other suspects on the list were his fellow scientists, who might well be suffering from professional jealousy, and even anger at being upstaged by a primitive. If he’d been an Edenite raised in a high tech environment and from a respectable university, they might have been more willing to accept his theories, though he doubted it. Seeing how they fought with each other anyway, he would still have been badly treated. But as a human, a savage from a backward world, he was completely beyond the pale.

  To Daryl, the theory made some sense. First, someone with detailed knowledge of spaceship technology and computer systems had very carefully orchestrated the attempt. Many of the scientists would fit those requirements. And second he knew that many of them were still angry with him. Spitting tacks as the saying went. But he couldn’t think of any who by themselves could have masterminded such an elaborate trap, and they didn’t seem to work well together as a team. Besides, he’d never heard of any scientist killing another out of professional jealousy. Musicians, athletes, actors and even politicians yes, but not scientists. Maybe that was simply his own natural bias showing through, but he couldn’t accept that true scientists could work that way.

  Sadly there were no other suspects, which meant he understood, that either one of those two groups was responsible, or someone else was. Someone who he and the Force had no reason to suspect.

  Neither option was pleasant. But worse still was the knowledge that while the culprits were still unidentified and somewhere out there, they could still be planning more harm for him. As his doctor informed him, when they got back to Unity, he was once more going to be under close guard. This time for his own protection.

  It didn’t appeal, being
watched, having his movements limited once more, as he was unable to leave the Targ. Not after he’d spent so long in the brig. But at the same time he could see the value in it. Especially when he’d been so easily suckered in by just a robot. Any citizen of the Community would have known better than to follow the machine in the first place. It was obviously malfunctioning, when it failed to give him the reason for his trip. But Daryl, being a complete novice to their society, was completely unprepared for that, and trying desperately to obey every rule and not cause offence. A vulnerability that his enemy had known about and counted on. And now he was no better prepared for another attempt than he had been then. Plus he knew that an enemy was out there, targeting him.

  Chapter Thirteen.

  A church was the last place Daryl would have wanted to spend his last day on Unity at, before he and the Targ shipped out again. But then again, the meeting he had requested was probably the last event he would have ever wanted to attend. The two went well together.

  Not that he expected a rough time. Karen had told him that the Elders would always be civil, and while he might be human, and a member of the same people who had attacked and killed their families, they knew he wasn’t to blame. On the other hand, he knew that there was a belief in some quarters that he was just stirring up trouble, and possibly trying to get his people off the hook for murdering theirs. He had a lot of trust issues to work through with them.

  The congregation itself was in better shape than he’d expected, and larger. After all, he’d expected that the very youngest attending would be over ninety. Anyone younger would have no real memory of the attack, or more importantly, the events preceding it. Many of the people present were a hundred and ten or more, and a couple had actually been on the various councils at the time. It was a good crowd.

  Of the three thousand or so survivors, he’d calculated that just over twelve hundred were thirty or more at the time of the attack seventy-one years before. It was a relatively young population with lots of children. But anyone under thirty at the time was unlikely to be able to tell him what he wanted to know. Thus his target age group was those currently aged one hundred and one or more. But his target group had of course been whittled away with time. The average human life expectancy was approximately one hundred and fifteen, even on Unity, and so all those over forty-six at the time of the attack were fighting against statistics. Worse still many of the survivors had not been in perfect health after the attack. Plasma bombs came with large doses of radiation, and many had died before their time.

  At present there were two hundred and seventy odd people who met his requirements, and one hundred and eighty of them were in the church in front of him. More he knew, were watching from their homes elsewhere. It was a good turnout. Better than he had any right to expect.

  It was in some ways a humbling experience, standing before them, waiting for the last to arrive. Not just because of the mountain of emerald eyes facing him, but because these were the true victims of his people’s crime. A living record to their evil. The other Edenites, their children, weren’t the direct victims, just as he wasn’t the actual criminal. But these eyes were somehow different to theirs. Harder to face.

  In time when they had all entered and taken their seats, the pastor of the church had given his blessing and they had all spoken a prayer, he was ready to begin. He just hoped they were ready to listen and, even though he had no right to expect it, to help.

  He started by introducing himself, though that was largely unnecessary. All of Unity now knew him as the first victim of an attempted murder in at least twenty years, as well as the upstart who’d set the scientific community on its ear. Once more he was famous, for all the wrong reasons. He also told them he was recording the meeting, but that no record of it would ever go to his people without their people’s consent. He needed it more as a memory aid, and he would leave all copies of the record in the direct care of the Force. Admiral Fale of the Force, an aged Aler was there to confirm that, and beside him two of his aids. The Force didn’t fully understand everything he hoped to achieve out of the meeting, and any subsequent communications, but they accepted that it was important. It was a form of natural justice if nothing else. A chance for the victims to lay the crimes of their attackers at their feet.

  What he wanted and what they wanted were slightly different though. The Force, having solved the crime seventy-one years ago, wanted a confession, and some sort of atonement. Yet the humans were constantly disappointing them. Even now when the evidence had been released, this time publicly, the humans seemed reluctant to confess. Something that confused and upset them. How could people still deny the truth when the evidence was placed right in front of them?

  Rather than an admission of guilt by the citizens of Earth what Daryl wanted instead was the guilty party. Because he was somehow sure, that the attack hadn’t been arranged by the full Earth Government of the day, only part of it. All the evidence they had found so far pointed to that.

  Despite a lack of a confession or a guilty party, they had made some progress too. The taped messages of the leaders of New Eden had quickly been shown to be a fraud. And those of the Government who had ordered it put together at the time were confessing one by one for their sins. But none had admitted knowing anything about the attack. Only to receiving a transmission from the Interstellar Community accusing them of the crime and demanding an explanation, which they couldn’t give.

  A month after the attack and having carried out the most thorough investigation that they could, they had moved into what could only be described as a face saving exercise. By then many of their people were worried because they couldn’t contact their relatives on New Eden, and the Government was being besieged by their representatives as well as the Force demanding an explanation.

  In desperation, they had fabricated the story of a disease, in the faint hope that it would avert a mass crisis or even a civil war. The loss of New Eden to their own people when they didn’t even know who was responsible was a disaster not only for the colonists, but for the Earth itself. The two other colonies in existence would immediately declare themselves as neutral, and put up defences as fast as they could, while their own people would immediately factionalise and start accusing each other of mass murder. The best predictions were that the Earth would spend at least a decade embroiled in a bitter political battle, with very likely extensive protests and some blood shed. The economy would be shattered, and fifty years of peace would be seen as a sham. The worst was all out civil war.

  As the surviving conspirators had confessed, they had brought out with them record after record, not only of what they had done, but also of the investigations they had made. These were now public domain documents, and as such were even available off world. Complete sets were held by the Force, who weren’t quite certain what to do with them. Nor did the Edenites themselves, who largely considered them propaganda. But at least after seventy years they were out there.

  The first reason why no one in power could find an explanation Daryl figured, was that it hadn’t been ordered from the top. Or at least not the entire top.

  He was working on the theory that another group of humans, perhaps renegade captains - and there were some known pirates at the time - were perhaps aided by collaborators within the Earth Fleet. Certainly they would have needed resources to build their assault fleet and they may have done the deed for their own reasons. It was thin, but it was the best he could come up with.

  What he needed, and what he wanted from this group wasn’t evidence of the deed, for there was plenty of that. No he was searching for the motive. Find a motive and at least he had a trail to begin tracking down the people responsible. And like it or not, he knew he was the only person who could even begin to do this work. He had access not only to Earth Fleet and Earth’s records, and the ability to ask them to do work on his behalf, but also to the Edenites, who no one on Earth knew about. He only wished he was a trained investigator.

  As he tried to
explain his reasoning on the subject he expected disagreement, and he wasn’t disappointed. Many told him he was either naive or part of the conspiracy itself, and he knew that there was little he could say to change their minds on that. Others told him he was simply in denial, unable to accept the obvious, and maybe he was. But despite that none of them left.

  Instead they stayed and told him of their home, their paradise, and he listened intently. He suspected that they weren’t telling him because they thought he could achieve anything useful, but rather because they wanted to remember how perfect their paradise had been. A world of milk and honey.

  And it had been a good place from all accounts. New Eden had been settled by Christians, as he well knew. Members of all branches of the faith. Catholics, Protestants, Baptists and so forth. That was after all the genesis of its name. They had emigrated to it wanting a new start. A place where their children and grandchildren could grow up in a peaceful and loving environment. Earth at the time had become largely agnostic. Religion was discouraged in a hundred different ways, mainly because it interfered with the running of a stable world. Religion could not be taught in schools, religious holidays had largely been replaced with standard holidays, and even the construction of churches was frowned on.