Grendel Unit

by Bernard Schaffer

  Eight hundred years later, humanity had, in fact, spread to multiple solar systems and mapped those that were inhabited by countless other creatures to be explored and exploited and harvested for resources. Then, just as the fateful words of Tamar the Defiler were at their most grimly apparent, an astonishing thing happened: The Council of Planetary Ministers abolished their policy of colonization in favor of a new philosophy. One of Unification.

  Instead of colonization, they would include native inhabitants and cultures into their fold. An open invitation was extended across every galaxy, in hopes that the uncivilized and undeveloped might someday take a place at the great table of civilization. Strict measures were taken to ensure that no eligible species individuality was lost as they joined the greater collective, including incorporating select portions of their histories and culture into our own.

  Of course, this did not sit well with some.

  A few misguided cynics said that Unification was the same as those ancient religions, which spread by absorbing local inhabitants' gods and legends and customs and holidays into their own larger, more pervasive systems. These cynics claimed that unifying with foreign inhabitants was essentially the same as colonizing them, but now, rather than stationing armies on their planet to ensure their subjugation, we offered them defense contracts and food replicators and the importation of our goods.

  And finally, there were the zealots.

  These rebels adopted the name Sapienists, and they rose up against this policy by declaring that humans had a sovereign right over all other species, and a moral responsibility to rule and govern. And while the more metropolitan systems laughed off the extremist views and paid them little attention, there were others who were not laughing. Struggling systems with fewer opportunities and resources were targeted by the zealots, and soon became infested with the belief that Unification was ignoring their needs in order to provide better lives for the various aliens scattered all across the universe.

  "Humans First," became their rallying cry, and when their attempts to be heard fell on deaf ears, they found a new way to make people listen.

  The first recorded attack occurred over thirty years ago, when a public transportation craft carrying mixed species was blown up by pro-human terrorists. Since then, Unification has continued to pursue its policy of integration while attempting to root out the Sapienists and those who would use terror to halt progress.

  Rest assured, your government is aware of the situation and doing everything possible to end the conflict in the most peaceful, and efficient way possible. It is imperative that all Unification citizens educate themselves to avoid the insidious and false propaganda campaigns conducted by Sapienists in every corner of our collective body. Perhaps you, or someone in your family, knows a Sapienist and have been exposed to their lies.

  There are multiple pamphlets available at your local Unification Works! information stations designed to assist you in educating others about the policies that provide for you and your entire planet.

  Remember to begin with the Unification Essentials Series, including:

  A Universal Year - Adapting your indigenous methods of telling time to Unification Standard.

  Every Day is a Holiday, But Which Ones Do I Get Paid For? - Now that we've adopted so many species holidays as our own, this guide will tell you which ones qualify you for days off, or extra pay.

  Military Service: Securing Your Future, and Ours - Looking for a life of adventure and travel? Do you desire to protect your galactic sector and serve your fellow Unification citizens? Unification Military Veterans receive huge scholarships and tuition bonuses, as well as real world experience that future employers will want. Opportunities are available for recruits to become doctors, pilots, clandestine intelligence operatives, and much more!*

  Contact your local Unification Military Services Recruitment Offices for an application and see if you have what it takes!

  Disclaimer: Acceptance into the academy is on a limited basis. All applicants must sign a liability waiver prior to their entrance exam due to possibility of death, dismemberment, or otherwise catastrophic event.

  *Specialized positions, such as those mentioned above, are extremely competitive and not guaranteed.

  8. When Will They Shoot?

  A large crowd of people crashed into one another in the background of the newsfeed flashing on the vid screen. Their shouting and chanting was loud enough to force the reporter to cover one of her ears and duck her head toward the small transmitter pinched between her fingers. "We are live from the scene of a mass demonstration in front of Unification's newest embassy, located on Zucariah Outpost," she shouted over the crowd. "Human settlers are protesting their forced relocation in order to make room for the arrival of yet another alien species into accepted citizen status."

  The feed cut to a small, purple-skinned figure with tiny black eyes, standing behind a podium. The creature looked up at the room full of dignitaries and said, "We are pleased that Unification has finally lived up to its name and given the Zucariahians a rightful voice in the governance of our own planet."

  The reporter's face re-appeared back on the screen, she was glancing nervously to her side as the angry mob closed in around her. "That was…that was Supreme Malec III, the elected leader of the Zucariahians, communicating his−" her voice changed to a high pitched yelp as a bottle sailed through the air and crashed on the ground near her. "Forget this, we're out of here!" she shouted, throwing up her hands to knock the hovering camera drone out of her way as she took off running. The camera was knocked off its gyroaxis and fell sideways, catching an upside-down image of the crowd chasing the reporter down.

  In the sky above the reporter, a squadron of Unification military ships could be seen lowering to the planet's surface, carrying hundreds of armored riot police. The feed turned to static momentarily until another reporter appeared onscreen, this one sitting at a news desk in a brightly lit broadcasting station. His shimmering blue suit was sharply pressed and his thick, wavy hair was brushed back and sprinkled with glitter. "Well," he said, his face a carefully-practiced look of calm, but sincere, concern, "Things certainly look like they're getting intense down there. Earlier I had the chance to speak with one of the young leaders of the Sapienist movement on the condition of anonymity, and you will not believe what he had to say."

  The blurred-out face of a hooded man appeared on screen. His voice was digitized and deep when he said, "The Sapienist movement is dead. We're moving beyond that. I don't consider myself a Sapienist, I consider myself a disciple. The human God has given us dominion over all the sludgesuckers in the universe, but because of people like you, who debase yourselves by consorting with non-humans, he is going to punish you. We are his punishment. We are the cleansing fire."

  Frank Kelly looked away from the vidscreen in disgust, but then he saw that the man sitting next to him on the interstellar transport was nodding along. When the Sapienist said, "We are the cleansing fire," the man mumbled, "Damn right."

  Frank picked up his bag and changed his seat.

  After he landed planet-side, he took the first shuttle he could find to the Unification Federal Courthouse. Back at school, all of his friends were still celebrating their graduation from college. Frank had thrown his cap into the air with the others and turned around and walked back to his dorm room to start packing.

  When he arrived at the courthouse, he waited in the long line of people trying to enter, going through the invasive security scan like everyone else. He never said his last name, and never said who he was there to see.

  He found a pretty young secretary sitting at the desk in the office outside of the judge's chambers, and she looked up as Frank Kelly walked in. There were various photographs and certificates decorating the walls around her, all of them also bearing the name Frank Kelly and images of a man who resembled him, just with gray hair and looser jowls. Frank smiled at the secretary and said, "Is the judge in?"

  She nodded and said, "I can
check. Your name please?"

  Frank leaned down and said, "I'm his son, but I'd prefer if you didn't tell him. It's kind of a surprise. I just flew in this morning."

  She whispered that she understood and got up from her chair to knock on Judge Kelly's door and said, "There's someone here to see you, your honor."

  "Who is it?" a man responded from inside.

  Frank wiggled his yellow graduation tassel in the doorway and said, "The guy you just spent a fortune on sending to school. I figured I'd show you what all your money bought."

  The judge stood up and threw his arms wide, "There's my boy! I watched the whole ceremony on the vidscreen. I cheered when they called your name. What a ceremony."

  "It was nice, I guess," Frank shrugged. He looked around at the hundreds of volumes of law books lining the walls of the office. Old books still bound in their original materials that looked like they'd fall apart if you touched their spine. New books programmed into individual scrolls of paper-thin plastic that contained rules of criminal procedure for ten thousand different species that fell under the judge's jurisdiction.

  The judge waived for his son to sit down and said, "I'm glad you're here. We have a lot to discuss."

  Frank nodded slowly and said, "Yes, we do."

  Judge Kelly cocked an eyebrow at him suspiciously and said, "I don't like the sound of that. What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, I was just agreeing with you," Frank said quickly, feeling his courage begin to dissipate faster than he could keep hold of it.

  "All right, well then let's get to it. I've already made several inquiries about openings at law schools in this sector. Obviously, I'd like you to go to Marbrax U. since that's where I went, but I'm not trying to sway you in any way. Even though I golf with the Dean of Admissions and just helped his son on a serious criminal case. That boy's going to be a problem, you mark my words."

  Judge Kelly kept speaking, until his voice was nothing but a low buzz in Frank's ears, and Frank had to speak to stop the buzzing or else he'd have been driven insane by it. "Dad, I'm not going to law school," Frank blurted out. "I don't want to be a lawyer."

  The judge continued, not listening, "And you can always apply to Vegaview School of Galactic Law if you want a good back up university. I know people on the board there who will definitely want a judge's son in their class."

  "Dad," Frank said. "I'm not going to law school."

  His father's head cocked sideways in confusion, as if Frank had just spoken in an alien language. "Sorry," he said. "What was that?"

  "I don't want to be a lawyer. Or a judge. I'm not going to law school."

  "What are you talking about? You've always wanted to be a lawyer. Why the hell else did you major in Criminal Law at college if you didn't want to be a lawyer?"

  "Because that was what you said you'd pay for," Frank said. "In fact, it was the only thing you said you'd pay for."

  The judge leaned back in his chair and studied his son carefully, like an opponent who'd just produced a weapon unexpectedly. He shifted in his seat then, gearing up to deal with the new challenge to his authority.

  That would easily be dealt with.

  Judge Kelly was a man accustomed to speaking with people who needed to be instructed. There were plenty of young men and women and vorakks and P'authia Giant Worm Segments and hundreds of other misguided and directionless youths who came into his court on a daily basis who needed to be instructed. He got out of his chair and walked over to close the office door and lock it. He quickly entered a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall and the room darkened momentarily as a bright blue beam of light stretched from one wall to the other and quickly rippled across every surface. The computer on the judge's desk went dark, and one-by-one, every electronic device in the room followed.

  Frank reached into his pocket and looked at his phone. The screen was black.

  "Maximum level of privacy ensured," the wall unit's computerized voice said.

  The judge leaned his hip against the edge of his desk, taking his time and gathering his words in his mind before he said them. He looked down at his son with a patient smile and said, "I'm going to talk to you like a man, Frank. There are things about this universe you don't understand, because you were never exposed to them. You were protected as the son of a judge, growing up on this planet in an all-human colony. Now, I know you just came out of school and they spent four years filling your head up with all that feel good nonsense about humans and aliens, but I'm telling you that it's not really like that. I don't call them sludgesuckers, but let's face it, that's what they are. They aren't like us, and they never will be. And if we walk around with our rosy-shade sunglasses on, thinking they'll somehow appreciate us, we're living in a fantasy.

  "Out here in the real world, these aliens are waiting to try and overrun us, son. Now, luckily, we've got control of things for the most part, but they outnumber us twenty to one, and if they all get their act together some day it's going to be all-out war. We are going to be fighting for our own survival. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  Frank looked at his father and said, "My school was multi-species. The valedictorian of our class was a Baltricorian."

  The judge waved his hand and said, "Sure, sure, of course there are some good aliens out there. I even have friends who are aliens, son. They managed to make something of themselves and didn't ask for handouts and didn't take the easy way. But I'm telling you, I see it every day. These alien scum will gut you and eat you quick as look at you."

  "That's funny, people say the same thing about lawyers," Frank said.

  The judge folded his hands in his lap and said, "Before I go any further, let me ask you this. What would you rather do than go to law school?"

  Frank braced himself. This was the moment of truth. "I want to be a doctor," he said.

  "A doctor?" the judge said, laughing sharply. "You want to go to medical school?"

  "That's right," Frank said.

  "Well, you can forget it. Listen, the medical profession used to be something respectable. Your Uncle Michael was a pediatrician, back before the government mandated all this cross-training, multi-species nonsense. His last delivery took thirteen hours and he wound up pulling forty-two eggs out of an Arachnothoid's rear end. Can you imagine that? Having to stick your hand up the hind quarters of some enormous spider? So get this, he finally gets all of the eggs out and starts putting them into the incubator. He can see all the tiny little spider babies crawling around inside the eggs, their little faces and furry legs, pushing against the membranes trying to get out. Just when he thinks it's over, the mother goes nuts and starts eating the eggs. He's trying to pull her off to save the babies he just delivered, and when security finally shows up, guess who they restrain?"

  "Uncle Mike," Frank said.

  "Uncle Mike," the judge continued, before waiting for his son to finish speaking. "They restrain him because he's violating some sort of sovereign species birthing law and he's got to watch his own patient sit there and eat half of her own babies. They took away his license after that, Frank. They took away his livelihood. He died begging on the streets. All because of some sludgesucker who wanted to eat her babies."

  And of course, you were too embarrassed by him to help him, Frank thought. He pressed ahead, knowing it was not the time for accusations. "I thought you didn't use that word?" Frank said.

  "Oh, grow up. I thought we were having an adult conversation."

  "Dad, I know it sounds bizarre but it's completely normal for the Arachnothoid species. They're too weak to produce milk after such a long birthing process, so they consume enough of their own eggs to feed the rest of the babies. She wasn't trying to kill the eggs, she was fighting to save them. Uncle Mike should have known that before he started the procedure."

  The judge stared blankly at Frank and said, "Do you hear yourself talking? That was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what doctors have to deal with now. Forget it. End of discussion. You're going to law school, an
d that's final."

  Frank steeled himself, suddenly glad he was sitting down because he was sure his legs were shaking now. "No, I'm not," he said.

  The judge slammed the desk in front of him and said, "You little ungrateful son of a bitch, I paid for you to go to college so you'd have some sort of future instead of glomming off of me the rest of your life. You pick anything else and you are on your own. Don't ask me for a damn thing."

  Frank sighed deeply and said, "I kind of thought you'd say that. I understand."

  The judge slammed his fist on a hidden button on his desk and the lights kicked back on. He turned away from Frank to focus on his computer's vidscreen, busying himself with some suddenly-important message or a new legal decision he'd been writing for weeks that would eventually be included in one of these same books surrounding them. He focused on anything he could find that was not his only son, standing by his desk, looking down at him.

  Frank was used to it. He reached in his pocket for the graduation tassel and dropped it on his father's desk without another word, and then he walked out.

  He rode the lift down from the judge's chambers to the courthouse's main entrance. It was packed with people and aliens and prisoners and uniformed courthouse staff. Everyone was stopped at the front entrance and body scanned for weapons. Because of the multi-species makeup of the Unification employees and a thousand other reasons, courthouses were high-valued targets for terrorists.

  Not that any of the alien species working here had the good jobs, Frank thought. They were sludgesuckers, the most vulgar term imaginable to describe anything non-human that had the temerity to think and speak and do more than just serve as food or pets. Some of the aliens Frank had met at school came from races that were hundreds of thousands of years old with a rich and varied culture. They had pursued art and holistic technologies instead of building massive ships that could skirt around the universe and weapons large enough to wipe out entire civilizations. Unfortunately, the humans had done exactly those things and now, we've taken over, Frank thought.