AD 23232
When I wake, I am aware of the planet. The firm soil, the atmosphere bound to the contours of the globe by selfish gravity and, underneath that, the collected heat of our star, Uttindar. There is a lake down the hill where I fish with my son, Unter. The gentle air courses through the windows in the house my forefathers built before the first star ships landed here – the house that is now my house, and will be my son’s house. He has just turned fifteen, and will be a strong man when he is grown. He has the same dark eyes that got me into so much trouble as a young man – eyes that watch to know, eyes that can wait a very long time for something.
When his mother, Gydda, passed from our knowing, we made a pact to become what we dreamed to be, my son and I. “I want to be brave.” He had said, holding a glinting plagioclase stone in his hand. “I want to fly and do important things like you did.”
“You will. The day will come,” I told him. If I lied, I did not know it. This was my son, and our story now. In the face of the empires, it was ours alone. Our every breathing moment was our authorship, and Gydda would be there with us along the way, even if we could not see her. “She is in every light that you see, Unter. Beyond the paling nebula, in the memory of even the empty places, she is watching and smiling because she loves you.”
“Does she still love you, too?”
I laughed, “Of course she does. She’d better!”
“Is she dead?” he asked with a stern scowl.
“Never.” I said.
____________________________________________________________________________________
A CAPTIVE REMEMBERED
From our house, there is a road that curves down through thick, shaded woods of Earth’s old trees. Someone brought seeds to many of the early settlements, and they grew very well here. We were lucky, and the forest smells of pine, oak, and cedar that also make fine firewood in the winter. There is something about the smell of smoke and ash that reaches at human primacy better than the sanitized plasma heaters everyone else uses when it’s cold. I feel the old world, after the fall of the EVE gate, when we were collectively reduced to ruin, to the status of our forebears on Earth, when it was man against the world. Now it is man against himself. The empires established that as soon as they could fly again.
Beyond this forest, the great scaffolding of a Freedom Extension foundry looms like a black wraith reaching skyward. The old missile transport systems still launch bright flickering payloads from time to time, but the Bestower-class transports are more common couriers. Unter was in awe for days after his first sighting of the haulers as they came in, all at once in the upper atmosphere. The shockwaves of their arrival sent aurorae across the sky and the low booming of scattering electromagnetic particles resounded for several minutes afterward. It must have been that moment, with a fleet of bright, golden Amarrian starships floating overhead, that I decided I wanted to see what the guts of one looked like. Unter saw them as angelic portents of a grand and adventurous future. He was not aware, and perhaps I should have been more direct with him, but these were the first slave ships to set down on Uttindar since the rebellion.
Gydda, where have you gone?
Gydda was taken in a ship just like the ones that hovered over us on that day. Unter would have been elated to see ‘mama’ getting to take a trip on such a vessel. I was enraged. The primal being in me wanted blood. Badly. My one bond-love in this galaxy, my wife Gydda, corralled like an animal and disrobed by strange hairless men in such a ceremonial fashion that I felt they would slaughter the lot of them – all the women. They wanted to make sure production of goods didn’t slow, but that production of people did. They needed a smaller, more workable population. Twenty years. So many of our bond-loves never came back from where they were taken. So many were killed en route to where they would be slaves for the empire. I swore that day, twenty years ago, that I would give every last bit of myself to find her. Fifteen years of not knowing. Last night, in a rushed holoscreen message, my friend and agent, Tillus Vrada, told me he had found her.
When I asked how he came across this information, all I got from him was “The stars have strange voices. Good luck.”
IN THE GUTS
My old friend Sonso always called the bridge of a ship the guts, “because that’s where your guts go when you die – all over the bridge”. I met him at night near the launching pad for a local, unnamed planetary interactions company that was most likely run by a Gallente pirate to launder ISK. We didn’t ask about such things, of course.
I recognized Sonso’s relaxed swagger from yards away in the moonlight. He was a tall, dred-locked pilot, greying at the roots now, but his old flight gear still fit as it should. He wore a small insignia of our race just at his left shoulder, made of the same leather as the rest of his garb. “Baxas!” we clasped arms in the way of Rifter pilots. The old manners never die, nor does the Matari spirit. “So she is alive!”
I could only smile.
“The universe is alive, then. We fought hard, Bax. But the war is never over, so they say.”
“Perhaps one day,” I said. “Are you ready to do this? You don’t have to –“
“I was always ready. My little sister has been gone too long for all of us. Tell me about this friend of yours, though.”
I looked upward along the length of tether between the launching dock and the distant point of light that was the Customs Office, locked in perpetual orbit. “Well, I can’t say that I know anything about him at all. He is an old Amarr Lord, or similar. Tillus would not tell me his name. Tillus may not have known it, either.”
“Amarrian! Why, how could you risk doing business with the enemy?” Sonso’s eyes glinted with renewed vengeance in the dark.
“Shhh-shh. He is an apostate. The one thing Tillus could tell me about him, was that he helped to free the old mining colonies, one by one, running slaver convoys to free zones. He risked his life for years. Is it true? Well, what’s true these days? Pilots are immortal now. We risked dying. He risked dying, to spite his empire and his damned kin – may their names eat their throats.”
Sonso Dradgda sat in the dirt and scooped a handful in a gloved fist. “If I sense, for a blinking moment, that this man is not being truthful with us…” he squeezed the sand and let it pour from his fist. “You and I know we fought to end the war. But it is never really over. This will be shaking hands with the enemy, even if he is not.”
“If you want to see your sister again, you’ll have to trust him, as will I.”
“You say this, and I know it is true. All I see is my brother’s corpse, aloft in the void, and the flash of beam lasers – their righteous greed cutting through our families.”
“That was then, Sanso. I saw it, too. I remember the ships, and I saw them again just last week. For all I know, they were the very same ships they sent away from here those years ago, with our wives and sisters locked away forever.”
Sanso seemed to relax. “Not forever,” he smiled. In the sand, he drew the coiling nautilus of the Minmatar.
THE RIDE UP
Against the backdrop of conveyor lines and silhouetted factories, Sonso and I sat and waited. The launching dock smelled of ozone and engine grease, and a cool breeze had begun in the night. Small courier drones ferried compacted boxes of raw material to and from several large warehouses, and an incessant metallic grinding cacophony enveloped the territory of the operation as the tether began ringing with friction. The man was coming down.
Sonso leaned in to be heard, “Your agent. Why do you trust him?”
I shrugged, “He’s a Caldari. They only do a thing if it will promise them money. The man has agreed to pay him heavily, ‘for the privilege of completing an unfinished task’, so he said. If he’s the only one with the information, what else can I do? You have to understand, Sonso. For fifteen years I’ve-“
“You don’t have to convince me, really. Let’s talk about something else for a moment.”
“How about fishing?” I suggested
“Yes, fishing is perfect.”
“Well?”
“Well, do you still use those old poles and worms like they did on Earth or have you grown up a bit?” Sonso leaned back with a self-satisfied smile across his face.
“I’ve grown,” I said. “But there is something about getting the guts on your hands, getting the worm guts under your fingernails that makes it so much more real. This world we live in is very unreal. We live on too many worlds to know who we are anymore.”
“You dig too deep, Baxas. No one cares about that. You are Minmatar. Always will be. You and me, color of the soil. It doesn’t matter what world you’re on, Bax. Hell, even if you’re sitting on an asteroid having lunch – we are the soil of planets, so every one of them is ours.”
“Except gas planets.”
“Don’t ruin this for me, Baxas.” He swatted at my shoulder, and then came to sudden attention “Look up!”
The elevator was in view now – a plain looking metal box not much larger than a standard flight capsule. In a matter of minutes, the carriage from the orbital customs office lowered, its doors slid open and we found ourselves facing a tall man whose features were obscured by a flowing black cape.
The man raised his right hand in a gesture of greeting and stepped forward off the elevator. “It seems my timing was off by a bit. I’ve been to Hek and back.” He said cryptically.
“I hope things didn’t go badly for you on the way here,” I said as I approached him.
“Not for me, no. But there is a dead man in Crielere who, I wager, is waking up in Fountain as we speak, and is very upset about it.” From under the cape, all we could make out was a twisting grin.
“You haven’t only been to Hek, then.” mused Sanso.
“As promised, I have procured two unmarked, pre-Jove ships. You’ll find no capsules in either ship – like the old days. If you die, you die. By the way, make no mention of price – it is my debt to pay. I just want you to be successful.” The unnamed man then took our forearms, one in each hand, and squeezed them. We did the same, and joined him on the elevator. The old Amarrian turned and closed the door behind us. The small elevator lurched beneath us and accelerated up much more swiftly than expected.
“Ships,” the man turned to me. “How long has it been since you’ve flown?”
“Since the rebellion, so fifteen years.” I said.
“You wear the scars well,” he said. “I have a few of my own, but those are deeper than the skin.”
Sanso turned to him, “How long did you work against the empire?”
His silence afterward was telling. The only noise was the gentle airflow from the ventilation system and the seemingly distant vibration of the tether magnetizing and repolarizing just outside the door. “Since the beginning,” he said. “And as you see, my work continues.”
“We cannot thank you adequately, and I know ISK is not in your interest. I wish there was a way we could show our gratitude,“ I offered.
“Be successful,” he said. “I want to see your beloved back with her people. That is the payment that I accept.”
“I trust this old chip in my head,” Sanso tapped his temple. “I can only hope that my reaction time and bravery still lights up like it once did. If so, then you and we will have our payments.”
“Your talents will come back immediately,’ he said, and opened up a holoscreen inside the elevator. A bright blue luminescent chassis appeared and rotated at the man’s gestures. I felt a chill of reminiscence run down my spine. Sonso’s face lit up with the focused interest and excitement of a much younger pilot.
“The two Stabber-class cruisers were going to be scrapped, but my influence is still strong with some old friends, so I was able to have them rebuilt and fitted for this occasion. They are shield fits, so you should be fast. Dual 180 millimeter autocannons. Each ships also has a full drone bay, so you should not be wanting for defense if anything small gets under you. You know that I will not be there to help you, but these old wrecks should be enough to keep you alive as it is – judging from your performance in the rebellion.” The elevator rapidly decelerated. He smiled again. “Here we are.”
We stepped out onto an enclosed catwalk, lit down each side by small light ports, the other end of which was attached to the entry port of a Zealot-class cruiser. The sheer immensity of this ship’s power and legacy encompassed me. Here was the most graceful of the enemy’s designs. How many times had I narrowly escaped death streaking out at me from the beaked beast – one loses count of such events. They all become the same. The ship, likewise, is always the same ship after a while. Sonso took in a breath as well. Memories flooded about, flashes of wartime visions, the scent of burning electronics, the grating alarms of history echoing through time and embodied now in the monster hanging beautifully just outside the viewports, and into which we now walked readily.
The Amarrian turned to us as we walked, “I don’t use a capsule, either. Juvenile, if you ask me. But you didn’t ask, of course.”
ON THE BRIDGE
“Welcome to The Saracen,” he said.
The access door slid away like the fine scale of some giant ornamented stellar serpent, something cooked in the heart of a star. The Amarr, I have to admit, know how to build death into the most beautiful things. The door closed behind us with a low, serpentine hiss. We were inside. None in the rebellion would ever have been this close to the heart of the enemy – the dragon’s lair itself. Above all, it was immaculately clean. I glanced at Sonso as he tried to wipe the dirt from his hands without getting any on the floor.
We mounted the old control platform. The control interface was familiar in a foreign way. I knew cruiser mechanics from the inside out, but the capacitor systems in this ship were much more refined and complex than our old warhorses. As well, the damage output must be immense. You could cook an entire Stabber wing with a ship like this. “Have you had the chance to fly any of the Matari second generation cruiser line?” Sanso asked of the man. “They’re a sight better than stabbers.”
“I have. And faster, too. Fearsome.” He turned to look out the window glass. “I enjoy them very much. But I am also a man who enjoys light and bright things. Munitions that disappear into the darkness of space leave me feeling empty. A laser is like one long explosion of energy, from my ship to whatever is…exploding. I was, unfortunately, unable to acquire any such vessels for our current purposes, for which I must apologize.”
I turned to him, “No. No, this is perfect. I’d prefer to be as unassuming as we can be until the moment we strike. If we seem like poor ratters, few will care – up until the point they’re in a stasis web with their microwarpdrives shut down.”
“We’re in accord, then. Please accompany me on the bridge. The view is much better up here,” he said, wrapping his cloak ceremoniously about the captain’s chair as he sat.
Sanso and I stood there for what seemed like an eternal moment. Here were two of the subjugated race, breathing the same air as one of the old slaving masters. Who was this man who had betrayed his own blood? In the back of my mind, I suspected that he was royalty, and that he carried a deep resentment for his line. Perhaps he had been denied a throne at some point. Jealousy tends to motivate a man more than honesty. If I could only see his eyes.
Here we are – no evidence that this man is truthful, other than Tillus’ word. But Tillus had been good to me for decades. Tillus’s own son died helping us ferry the freed slaves back to Hek and as far away as Synchelle when the Gallente would harbor us.
For all we know, this man is a resistance slaver, and still operating in the trade. We could be walking into bondage willingly. If so, we are the biggest fools, and Tillus is a dead man. But he knows that. There is also something else about this Amarrian – he does not have the haughty arrogance of his kind, and there seems to be no hint that such an arrogance ever existed in his demeanor. He was wronged somehow – by his own. No one walks away from their entire culture and beliefs without damn good reason. We Minmatar still cling to the dirt of our precious worlds, but this man has lost more than perhaps any of us. There is something very great to which he can never return.
The man turned to us, “Are you ready?”
“Never more ready,” said Sonso, gripping the railing around the bridge. He still stared out toward the distant asteroid fields that tumbled along. A single bright line appeared and disappeared, over and again – the sign of a miner.
“Your hearts must be stout!” The old Amarrian said so suddenly that Sonso and I both turned to him at once. Something in his voice was definitely regal, commanding, almost inspiring. “Before we leave, we must establish a bond of trust that I am not sure we have at this moment. But we will have it in the next.” He said.
Sonso placed his hand close to the pistol he kept behind his hip.
The man stood behind the control array and threw off the hood of his robes. “This is my testament.” We saw then the pitted slits of skin where his eyes had been. The marks of a crude sewing job left scars all the way down to his cheeks. “My scars go deeper than the skin. This was my penance for my beliefs, or lack thereof. I believed in humans, and I still do. The Saracen is my eyes now. Truth is a thing seen with the mind, and I will never hesitate to lose more than a pair of eyes to see that Truth and Justice are chased down and realized.” He threw his cloak back over his face, and we saw the wry smile again. “My apologies for being abrupt. At my age, I afford little time for courtesies.”
Sonso’s mouth hung open. He looked at me and then back at the man. “I trust you.”
I felt a pride and hope well in me that almost broke my composure. We clasped arms again with the old Amarrian, and he with us. It occurred to me suddenly that what I was feeling was happiness – despite the risk of losing my own life, of perhaps never seeing my bond-love again, of losing my friend Sonso in the effort, I was happy from the inside out. The same thing that kept us going throughout the rebellion was again alive in all of us in that instant – hope.
“I swear to my own blood,” I told him then, “that I will introduce you to my Gydda before this is all over.”
SET DESTINATION
The Saracen broke away from its moorings. The increase in aft mass, as The Saracen’s massive drives took effect, sunk the men in their seats as the ship aligned away from the customs office. The man did not ask if his guests were prepared for warp – the spool-up always felt the same. A pilot’s body never forgets – gravity pressing backward against your skeleton in an attempt to crush every bone with invisible force. A deep, grinding energy in the ship’s warp drive took over and the hull dropped heavily into its own gravity footprint as the stars and nearby planet condensed into the blue blur of the warp tunnel. The ship’s carapace roared as it reached maximum warp, and the view of Uttindar’s sun passing across the visual field was as a lone, bright god burning across the millennia. The engine of our people. In mere moments, the stargate to Bei rushed up ahead, rapidly growing to overtake the window glass. Its nuclear energy pulsed the bright orange that would carry them to Bei and the systems beyond.
“Gydda last saw this gate twenty years ago!” Sanso exclaimed. “She will see it again. Before the day is out!” Sanso was laughing, and I saw the same happiness encompass him as well.
I am aware of the nature of ownership, and that to have pride in our things is a fallacy when things can be lost so easily. We have watched the Gallente and Caldari blast each other to particles from above – their missile trails, a pale fungus growing and blooming, tendrils fanning out toward death. Amarrian lasers, beautifully latticed together toward doom, and our rough autocannons and artillery, the booming rapid-fire retribution for the wrongs done to us at the hands of the greedy and the vicious. All of this was for ownership – to lay claims on something that would be soon lost again. Perhaps, one day, we can lay down our tools of death. But for those who were there, the war will never be over. Even if the guns have silenced, the reverberations of war leave a battlefield in the heart. It is rare for hope to show itself to the downtrodden, to step in the blasted-out holes of our spirits. Hope is not trusted, but we must give it one last small chance before we steel ourselves for an eternity of loss. We will have to kill again to realize this hope, and perhaps it is the chance to get the last kill-shot that makes all the difference.
natpowers 