Chapter Text
This was absurd, I thought. How was I supposed to write a life story relevant to people who hadn’t been born yet?
“Hi. My name is Kevin. I’m human, mostly. A bit human, a bit inhuman; a bit biological experiments and a bag of chemicals and a bit of a big mechanical war machine called Pegasus. Emily keeps bothering me to write down my life because someday someone might want to know about us – the five of us- and I’m the only one who hasn’t recorded it all. The five of us are close. We grew up in the same village, way, way back, on a little green planet called O-076. They started designating all planets with numerical devices shortly after the seventeenth ‘Pandora’ and the twenty-third ‘Eden.’ There were a few too many Valhallas and New-Earths too. I’m from Neartree, which you wouldn’t find in a map even if it was for the right planet, because it was too small. Only the locals knew its name, and it doesn’t exist anymore.”
That was the problem. Very little existed anymore, and what did exist was locked in my faulty soft biological brain, not the nice big reliable solid-state drives where it needed to go.
I shut off the recorder with a click and looked up at Emily, who stood behind my chair. “How’s that?” I asked.
The corners of her mouth quirked up in a funny sort of smile- she was more amused than pleased. “Just keep writing it,” she said. “I’m sure there’ll be coherency later on. Are you going to use the memory banks?”
“I’ll have to.” I rubbed my temples. Having memory on a solid-state hard drive made it easier to remember things, but sometimes I didn’t want to. Unlike our day-to-day audio/ocular feed, the memory banks recorded all five senses. Reliving a memory could be a bit more … literal than anyone wanted. Some of mine were things I would rather leave in the past, but only I could access my memory bank, and if I wanted others to learn from my experiences, then I’d have to dive back in and relive them myself. Maybe it would be for the better, I reasoned. We had no shortage of time- and maybe it would let me get a little closure from the things I’d avoided for so long.
She gripped my shoulder for a long moment, then released me to my work and left the chamber.
I queried for memory bank access and Pegasus requested conformation. I confirmed. Pegasus requested again. Yes, you dolt. I know what I’m doing, I retorted.
High chance of psychological trauma. Pegasus sent a visual of what, exactly, it thought would happen to my brain if I used the memory banks. Pegasus would know- we’d made those memories together.
I know! I’m willing to risk it, even if you aren’t.
Calculating risk assessment….
Shut up. Grant access or I’ll circumvent your tired old circuits myself.
…Access granted.
I set the auto-disconnect for twelve hours. Pegasus dropped the life-support mask in front of my face and I put it on. The tubes down my throat were familiar, my face long since accustomed to the mask’s rubberized margine. The chamber’s lights dimmed until all I could see with my own eyes were Pegasus’ winking status lights overhead. I closed my eyes and switched to audio/ocular, then to audio/ocular playback, and then to full memory playback. The process took a few minutes, rerouting sensation from physical sources to the electronic feed through the cerebral plug. My head knew I was sitting upright in a padded seat in a little chamber between Pegasus’ four legs, its open body cavity above me dangling the dozen cables required to keep my mind and body functioning, but my mind… my mind was telling me I was floating weightless, bodiless, before a huge swarm of audio/ocular input queries. I selected the rout to the memory banks and the access screen flashed up. I scrolled backwards, back through thousands and thousands of files, each a saved five-sense recording of a wake period. The memory bank was compiled during sleep cycles. The longer files… well, let’s just say I didn’t always get enough sleep growing up.
I found the first one. Pegasus flashed a warning that the file may be incomplete, leading to gaps in sensory input, but I was fine with that. The first series of files were from before I became a part of Pegasus and were recorded and saved during the imprint process. They would play back like normal human memories, but clearer and relatively undistorted, and for that I was grateful. It would make the later recordings a little easier to bear.
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Planet designation O-076, Sovereign State Vaamin, township Neartree
Relative age 21 years
Hannah made an impish face at me across the table. Her nose wrinkled back and she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. I tried not to smile but was mostly unsuccessful.
The captain glanced up but she had smoothed her face once more into military blandness- the picture of a perfect recruit. He raised one eyebrow but did not question her. Instead he turned to Joel, beside me. “So you think you have what it takes?”
Joel spread his massive hands on the table, nearly covering the documents there. “This is my home. This is my family. No hired solder could fight with half the sincerity we bring.”
“You speak for all of you?” The captain included all of us at the table with the sweep of his eyes.
Joel nodded, slowly. He was used to being recognized as our leader, I think. He was physically the most imposing of us, especially when seated between the utterly unimposing Emily and narrow-shouldered me, and across from petite Hannah and near-skeletal Andrew. He had dark skin, dark eyes, no hair and a face calm as if it were etched in stone. He’d been brought up to rigidly control his emotions- as the biggest in any crowd, an offhand gesture on his part could do more damage to people or infrastructure than a well-aimed punch by someone the size of Andrew or myself. But I knew he was kind, as well- he had more empathy than any man and most women I’d met. I’d seen him stop a convoy just so he could cross the road and ask a crying child what the matter was. Initially, most children in our town had been terribly intimidated by someone the size and shape of a big black bear but now he couldn’t walk down the street without having a few kids clambering up his back to try and sit on his shoulders.
Andrew, on the other hand, couldn’t let any part of himself remain still for more than a few seconds. At present he was madly twitching one leg under the table, sending tiny vibrations through the surface of the water in the plastic cup in front of me. His wide grey eyes darted right and left around the room- seeking information? Escape? I didn’t know, but I did know him well enough sense his boredom. I predicted another five minutes, then he’d be up and out of the room without apology, dashing off to find distraction elsewhere. He was pale and freckled and in possession of mop-shaped blond hair, which I don’t think he ever combed with more than his fingers, perhaps once a week at best. In our town, he was known as a bit of a rogue- no one really knew who his parents were, though he’d been brought up by a neighbor family. He was passionate about gadgets that did things- right now, the sort that sent tiny electric currents through household appliances to zap the fingers of whoever touched them next- a juvenile prank for someone his age, but still highly entertaining to the rest of us. As the odd child out in school, he had been ostracized for his outlandish behavior and unpredictable moods until Joel had decided he was interesting and made a point to draw him out. Now, the two polar opposites were near inseparable- Andrew could, and did, get away with nearly anything while Joel patiently shielded him from the indignant victims of his harmless-if a little humiliating-pranks.
The captain lowered his bushy eyebrows and stared hard at all of us again. “You know what this means. War is not pretty,” he looked at the girls. “War is dark, it’s messy, and you don’t come home the same. I don’t want to send children like you onto a battlefield.”
“That battlefield is two hundred miles from my back door,” I said. My voice startled even me. I wasn’t exactly known for talking, but I was catching a little of Andrew’s impatience. “We can’t afford to wait and hope it passes us by.”
“There’s no guarantee the conflict will come this direction,” the captain said.
“And there’s no guarantee it won’t,” Hannah retorted. She glared at him. “Neartree is at the crossroads of the best roads into the interior. And we have the only guaranteed pure water supply and solarfrac for what, five hundred miles? I bet they’ll be here in a month.”
“If they are, no amount of basic training is going to help you survive. We’ll evacuate the entire town the moment the fighting turns this way- your families will be safe without your contribution,” The captain said.
I sighed. I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to hear it. War in the age of starships seemed a silly thing. There were hundreds of habitable planets in the galaxy, most only a few months’ travel out from the nearest warp gate. But war was happening, right here, in our tiny little corner of the continent. Laws governed war- after the Hundred World War, the Core set down a proclamation outlining how, when, why and with what war could be performed- but that only made it more brutal for people like us, untrained, young, civilian. This was a little battle between countries, seen as small and insignificant by our neighbors. Vaamin was being invaded by big Kire. Both countries had hired mercenary armies from offworld to come down and fight for them, but Kire, being an exporter of rare minerals to several other worlds in our solar system, had considerably more capitol to work with. Normally, with such a large discrepancy in power, a smaller country would capitulate without fighting at all, but Vaamin was scared. Kire had annexed four smaller countries already and its political and financial attention was spread thin. Their mercenaries were tired and running out of patience- they wanted their paychecks and a flight home- and they were beginning to bend the rules of fair fighting.
Izos, a little mountain country north of Kire, had put up nearly no resistance but Kire’s mercenaries had destroyed its population and infrastructure in an effort to end the conflict sooner. We called it the ‘one day war’ because on that day Izos lost over twenty thousand civilians and all their solarfracs. The civilian casualties were twice the number of their fighting force, and the survivors of their military claimed the mercenaries had fired on the solarfracs after Izos had surrendered. Details were sketchy, but we were scared.
Vaamin was playing for time with its own mercenary resistance. Every citizen not required for basic operation or physically tied down to something (and there were a few who had chained themselves to immovable bits of property, just to show their patriotism) had been shuffled as far from the conflict as possible. Negotiations were open with the more moderate side of Kire and several thousand had already been shipped into the aggressing country, to massive refugee camps where at least they would be safe until the conflict was decided.
And then there were those like us. Young, arrogant, scared for our land and families, with the images of the exploding solarfracs etched into our minds. We wanted to be a part of the push against Kire, even if just to show the bigger country that not all its neighbors were spineless backwater farmers. So we had gathered, the five of us, and contacted the captain of the guard for our town. Neartree already evacuated everyone not essential to keeping the solarfrac running, but that meant the five of us were all the more eager to help- it was our families who kept the big energy plant operational and supplied sterile water, synthetics and fuel to the surrounding five towns. The plan was for the plant to be handed over peacefully if the fighting did get close enough, but we didn’t believe the mercenaries would let that happen.
Not after Izos.
Hannah, for all her five feet of temper, stood the most to lose. Both her parents worked at the solarfrac. Her ancestors had built the plant and every single penny of her parents’ wealth was tied up in machinery, land, infrastructure and the house that had contained all five generations of solar engineers. I didn’t want to be too critical of her ties to her lifestyle, but even if Neartree survived Kire would seize the plant and install its own technicians and Hannah and her family would lose everything. She fought for status as much as for family, but for her it was important. She flickered her dark eyes from me to the captain and back again and her mouth was set in a hard, angry line.
“We’re willing to risk all that,” Emily said. She shrugged her shoulders. “You know what we know- about Izos. If they fire on the solarfrac, it’ll destroy the entire town. There won’t even be topsoil left on the fields for miles around. I think I’d rather die here trying to save it than run off to hide in a dusty camp in enemy territory.”
“They won’t be enemies much longer,” the captain said. His voice already registered defeat. “We can’t hope to win this.”
“We don’t need to win,” Joel said. “We only need to survive. Here. In our homes, on our land. Make it clear to the mercenaries that we’re more trouble than we’re worth to bother destroying. There are other roads to the interior. Other solarfracs to take.”
The captain sighed and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “I can’t take you into the guard, not this late. We haven’t got enough weapons to go around and no one to train raw recruits. I can see if our hired friends have a place for you, though.”
“The mercenaries?” Hannah snorted.
“You’re the ones who want in on the bloodshed, children. You decide how much you’re willing to sacrifice.”
I stared at the captain. Mercenaries… well, it wasn’t unexpected. Vaamin was not a place of war. We’d all been a little surprised our town guards had weapons beyond crossbows and trebuchets, when they marched out weeks ago to organize the first evacuations and help the mercenaries build their fortifications. Of course they didn’t have anyone to spare for training, much less weapons more effective than the hunting rifles they’d pilfered from the local marksmanship club.
The price we pay for living in peace, I though. The price we pay for having the worst criminal in the town’s history be famous for zapping the mayor with his own toaster. I eyed Andrew. He’d be in seventh heaven if he ever got off this world and into a place with technology more advanced than our outdated data processors and solar batteries.
Emily reached across Joel’s lap. I knew the gesture- my hand found hers. She winked at me. Mercenaries meant adventure, and adventure meant she wanted in.
Joel took careful stock of us. He seemed to gather up our intentions, our warring desire to remain here, of this place, and die on our own soil, or to lend our strength to a foreign group and chance at least life with dignity.
“We will fight,” he said. “Send us to them.”
The captain shook his head. “Your parents will hang me for letting you go.”
“We’re all of age,” Hannah retorted. “And there’s no law against leaving the mercenaries as soon as all this is over. If we’ve got a hare’s chance of stopping them blowing this place to a new star, we’ll take it.”
And take it we did. Three days later the five of us strapped into bench seats in the rear of an old farm truck and drove south down the winding village road. Turns out we weren’t the only idiots in town- ten more joined us, other youths sent by the captain to join the mercenaries or die trying. When the troop truck of fifteen farmhands, carpenter’s boys, idealistic children and our one sarcastic socialite rolled into the mercenary camp, a very long drive later, all of us had already begun to wonder if this was truly the life we wanted.
We wondered again when we met our new captain.
He was as tall as Joel and nearly as wide, though his face was lined by strong emotion. Mostly shouting, we came to understand. I found out later he could speak in a normal voice, but for the first two weeks we didn’t hear it.
Mercenary training is a rough, fast affair. We were literally thrown in, headlong into a heap in the middle of a crazy-pitched tent, and told to sort ourselves into a line based on who we thought was the strongest and most capable among us. Somehow this resulted in Joel at one end and Hannah, furious and swearing, at the other. Emily and myself were somewhere in the middle, until Joel pulled us down the line to stand a little closer to himself.
I looked around for Andrew but he had already vanished. When the camp lights cut out a moment later, I knew where he was. He spent most of training in the back of a broken-down cattle car, an improvised brig, and the rest of it gleefully messing about with any electrical device he could get his hands on. Finally, someone in the mercenary group caught on and assigned him to ‘tech division,’ where he promptly figured out how to apply his spark-making expertise to a range of clever little explosives.
The rest of us… well, Joel was there, and we survived. Our fifteen from Neartree were one of a dozen such groups joining the mercenaries. We learned to slog through a little mud, shoot a few weapons, wear a bulletproof helmet, and not ask questions when told to do silly things. We heard a lot about ‘real fighting,’ ‘real men,’ and ‘real death,’ but they didn’t mean much until the day of our first skirmish. Seems such things were a bit planned and it was no secret the opposing force of mercenaries were paying us a visit. We recruits were placed on the fringes and told to take notes- there’d be an exam later.
I remember watching the battle from near the top of a little nol and thinking it was a little like a game of checkers, with different groups advancing, halting, and advancing again, taking over one another until they met an adversary, then fighting for the right to occupy the same space. I watched a lot of bullets fly but few men were badly wounded. The mercenary way seemed to be one of intimidation and kicking dust.
Indeed, when we returned later the commander told us as much.
“This is all posturing. You are farm brats. You’ve seen two bulls square off and shove each other around a pen for days before one of them really decides to fight. And then it happens, and one bull’s alive and well and the other’s hanging over the fence. We know which bull we are. They know which one they are. They’re still in a shoving mode and we’re not going to risk breaking them out of it.”
“Is there any hope?” one recruit asked. I recognized him from the farmstead a few miles from my own.
The commander shook his head. “None at all, but they aren’t going to kill us if they can help it. Mercenaries usually try not to.”
“Tell that to Izos,” Hannah spat.
“I wasn’t at Izos,” he replied, calm. “Neither were they,” he thumbed in the general direction of the opposing camp. “My guess? Izos was just two drunk idiots fighting in a village square, only one of them had launch codes and the other had a stick. It happens.”
To hear it spoken plainly took the wind from all of us.
“I know you signed on to save your homes and families.” The commander tapped the stack of papers on his camp desk. “I won’t hold you to them once this is over, but my guess is a few of you will come with us. Your little world is going to be unified under the Kire banner before too much longer and anyone who can’t bear that thought has no business sticking around.”
I saw the set of Hannah’s lips. She talked big and her temper was up, but I knew she would give anything to go home once this was all over. Andrew didn’t have much of a home. If the mercenaries offered him a good position working with electrical things and codes, he’d stay with them. Joel… he would be torn. He loved Andrew like a little brother and would hate to leave him alone in an unfamiliar world, but he had his own parents and siblings to consider. Same with Emily, same with me. We would stay.
If home stayed too.