[spoiler]
"Don't fucking move!"
Tyler's words spun them around and locked the group into position about fifteen meters away from us. They all had their weapons drawn, except for the Voromni ringleader, who stood facing us with smile on his face and a black nylon bag under his shoulder. A holster swayed from his hip, and his hand hung above it in a similar fashion. Dancing grass blades in the wind blurred the space between us, until we were all standing face to face, rifle to rifle. They outnumbered us almost two to one, so who shoots first? I focused my gaze on the ringleader and watched laser sights dance across the loose Kevlar folds that were piled onto his chest. My own weapon strafed back and forth between the line of targets to locate one without a glowing sight already trained on him. In my panic, I couldn't find one. The sensation of someone staring at me from behind my back crept into my mind, and I knew I was painted. I felt like the loser in a game of musical chairs.
With effort, a few seconds ticked by in slow motion. I could see Tyler's mouth moving beside me, the smirking ringleader waving his hand around in time with his responses. Physical voices, grass blades, and laser sights were slowly muted, my internal voices replacing them in force. No point in stopping them now. We were going to die. We had missed our window for a miraculous escape, all that was left was an unhonored death in a bloodless field. Squinting, the barrel pointing at me was a painfully defined chute into oblivion. The pistol was rumbling in my palm, like the bolts within were fighting for a top spot in the chamber. Made sense, since at most I would only be firing one of them before I hit the ground. Was this really the end? Was this how I was going to go out? I thought of the men who died in the Civil War. Had they the same thoughts as me? This felt awfully like our own personal civil war, standing here on real grass behind the party that brought us here, with nothing but honor left to our names. The battle had not begun yet, but it burned in all of us as something that defied the definition of the word. We were here to do what Johnny and his band of soldiers had done a couple centuries back. Line up in a field, salute the enemy, load our muskets, and die.
I had always hoped that life didn't come to this; a linear sequence of events ending in a bureaucratic red stamp of termination. Every conversation you ever had, every person you ever knew, every molecule of air your lungs have ever touched--all imprints of your life that no one will remember, all of them meaningless and without resolution. Your fate was not to die, coughing up blood, holding the hand of your loved one and whispering words that carried more meaning than everything you said during your entire lifetime. Your fate was not to fall in a climactic battle, thrusting the flag of victory ever forward, looking nice for the cameras so that you might have a shot at eternity, locked away in a history file. That was all I could think about--staring down a barrel and picturing my own corpse with a hole about that size drilled into the head--that eternity could only be found in the physical world, and what everyone aspires to is causing a big enough explosion to warrant their place in all of it before it was their time to go.
Happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.
Tyler is speaking to them, and he is a great diplomat, right? He knows his dialects, so the ringleader won't be offended by his accent. He can reason with them. On second thought, maybe reason didn't apply here. Two to one odds, in the middle of nowhere, with no witnesses. It was almost insulting that we chased them here. The physical world of swaying grass and shouting voices hurtled back towards me with the Doppler effected sound of shrapnel whirring through the air. Screaming, now, our line is tensing, legs locking into readying positions. The ringleader draws his pistol, and his cronies shoulder their rifles. In my palm the pistol is shaking in violent spasms. Tunnel vision takes over, fifteen meters become fifty, the sky is stretched out into a black latex cover, as if to conceal the ensuing bloodshed from the stars. I close my eyes and think of clouds made of musket smoke drifting across the field, and pull the trigger.
Chapter 1: A Security Job
You know what I like? Hats.
A hat is the single most functional and meaningful piece of clothing that human being can wear. The umbrella term of 'hat' seeks to identify such a diverse plethora of cranial adornment that I wonder how anyone can stand to wear a hat and not affix some sort of tag upon its rim to inform bypassers of what type of hat this garment is trying to represent. After all, it could be a cap, an unstylish statement that your eyes cannot handle whatever light is being projected from above, a helmet, a protective shield meant to cover that which is most vital to you, or a thousand other styles of 'hat' that all accomplish different things. A hat is also different from other pieces of clothing in that a hat immediately projects a clear message or intent, even to those not gifted with an inherent sense of fashion.
Suppose a man is wearing a cap with a lavish red logo plastered along its front side. This man is walking in a crowd of like minded individuals, all sporting the same cap. One can surmise that this man is, indeed, walking to or from a local event involving his team of choice. Another is walking through the structured confines of an urban center, helmet condensing his scalp into a grainy mixture of hair and sweat. This means several things: One, the man sees it fit to supply his grey matter with an extra layer of protection. Two, the man, either by his chosen profession or some other set of unforeseeable circumstances, has reason to believe that his synapses are in danger of being rerouted to a more ground level location by way of a bullet or some other physical object. Three--as an extension of two--is that this man is either dangerous or carries an aura of danger about himself, and should be avoided if possible.
The outward meaning of a hat also extends beyond its intended purpose as an article of clothing. If you think about it, a hat is the most effective item that humans can use to express themselves with. The face is the focal point of human interaction, it is the area that our eyes snap to when meeting someone new, a social instinct of sorts. A hat skirts around the edges of that area, dropping hints about the identity we have manufactured to those we converse with. The wearing of a hat is also a subconscious statement against something that we can never completely understand. What is a man's skull, but a helmet hidden beneath layers of skin? It is the helmet we were born into, and the helmet that we will wear for the rest of our lives. When you put on a helmet, regardless of the quality of protection offered, you are essentially pointing to whoever gave you that helmet at birth and saying, "No. Your helmet is not good enough for me. I need this one." We, as a species, have reached the point where our helmets are so clearly superior to those created by whoever made the first helmet, that we are now officially above the system. Whoever made our skulls and forged our spirits over a blackened iron anvil in the stars is out of business; he can't keep up with the times.
The same goes for hair. On Earth, before humanity had cars or muskets or big screen televisions, our hair had a purpose. Eighty percent of all body heat lost is lost through the head, and our hair used to be pretty important. Now that we have hats, hair is nothing more than an outdated model. Sure, some people keep it around as an antiquity, but we can easily afford better.
This water is far too cold for thought. I don't need a hat. I need a blanket, a jacket, and a goddamn pan fryer to throw myself on. I'm standing in front of a mirror, trying to wash my face with what feels like ice water, and not a single towel on the rack. Jen didn't turn the AC off last night, again, and it's freezing in here. I get dressed through gradual shivering movements, and I was either hallucinating or my breath was solidifying in front of me all the while. I wrapped a dark red bandanna around my forehead and pushed my hair up through the funnel it created. I don't own any hats.
In the hallway, I could feel that eighty percent slipping out of my pores and into the sea of oxygen molecules that hovered about the ship. Khomera still hasn't fixed the damn O2 filters; the stuff smells like pool water and is probably going just as easy on my lungs. Either it's killing me slowly, or this is what real air tastes like and I have just been spending too much time with a gas mask on my face.
On the bridge I find Jen meditating under a series of luminescent blue cords that descend from the ceiling, all plugged into an angular and painful looking metal shell that covered the back of her head and right shoulder. She seemed to float in tune with a gentle hum coming from the legion of consoles that formed a semicircle around the bridge. I didn't think of waking her until I remembered that, although things were technically 'automated', everything on the bridge was routed directly to Odin, including the refrigerator. As I neared, the glowing blue cables lost some of their hue, and she lifted the helmet from her head to turn over her shoulder and stare at me. Strands of blonde hair dripped from the helmet like melted cheese. Her eyes were sunken, but twitched with something resembling excitement.
"What do you want? It's," her eyelids flickered for a moment, "only four thirty."
"Nothing, I just wanted a drink." She caught my look of confusion, removed the cables, and set the helmet down into a compartment which sealed behind a layer of glass. With a yawn she rubbed her eyes and got up from the chair, which folded back into the floor.
"Odin's sensors picked you up, he told me you were getting closer. Hey, Odin?" Odin's metallic voice, something like a sports announcer reading a eulogy for a person he never met, filled the cabin.
"Yes?"
"Can you let Aaron get a drink? Fridge is locked." A series of locking mechanisms that sounded more complex than the ones we have guarding the airlock disengaged from the wall. A square compartment swung out. Inside were a few cokes--processed and based on a recipe, not the real deal--three curved containers filled with a yellowish fluid, and maybe two dozen nondescript bottles of water. I grabbed a coke and raised it slightly towards nowhere in a gesture of appreciation.
"Thanks." The fridge slammed shut as I walked back towards Jen, who was caressing the top of a black console, looking out through the blast shield at the Sparta's hangar bay.
"You're welcome." She gave a slight nod to the ship in acknowledgment of his good manners. I stood behind her and popped the top from the coke bottle, taking a quick sip and savoring the taste. Framed in the blast shield was a group of partially dismantled UEF Serpents; long range fighters. Most of them lay on the ground, stripped bare down to the cockpit, but a few were suspended on lifts and had small coolant tubes aimed at them from the deck. They were lined up against a featureless steel wall with no windows.
"Nice view." I said, over Jen's shoulder.
"Could be worse."
"Khomera up yet?" Stupid question to ask at four thirty in the morning, but everyone's schedule was a bit off from what I could tell. Myself, I get confused with the time conversions, so I just stopped bothering. Go to sleep when I'm tired and wake up when people yell at me, it's a good philosophy.
"Yeah, actually." She acted like that didn't warrant an explanation.
"Why? And when?"
"Didn't really say, just something on the upper deck. Maybe twenty minutes ago? Tough to tell with time dilation and all," she motioned towards the metal helmet, "probably nothing. What are you doing up, anyways?" I finished off the coke before answering. A small trash receptacle slid open from one of Odin's consoles, and I shot the bottle into it.
"Well, I wanted a drink. It's so damn cold in here, though. I don't know how you can stand it." I turned and headed back towards the hallway. Resting on the edge of a black fold-out table was a ruffled manuscript of some sort. The binding was torn and crooked, and a few pages launched out in random directions. Closer, it said 'Paradise Lost' on the front. Over my shoulder, running my fingers across the text:
"You reading this?"
"No, Odin's reading it."
"Oh."
Out on the deck, fifty meters behind the Exodus's chitinous exoskeleton, there is a small group of Voromni engineers working on one of the Serpents. Walking past them on my way to the transport deck, I notice one with a red patch on his shoulder. He was going over a checklist, making circles around the group. Above his right eye I saw a peculiar leaf like symbol, and suddenly his physical form fell into place.
"Hey, Sherek." I spoke timidly in a neutral Voromni accent, and was relieved when he looked up. I hadn't mistaken him. Like the rest of the group, he had a compact trapezoidal gas mask plastered to his features.
"Good morning, Aaron." He started in English, and I followed him.
"You too--uhh, did you see Khomera walk by?" His tail waved a bit with the question, and he handed the checklist to one of the engineers.
"Yes, about ten units," -he made a scratching noise that approximated an English 'Err...'- "fifteen minutes, ago. Are you looking for him?"
"Kind of, thanks for the help."
"You're welcome. If you run into Thomas, would you mind telling him to come down to hangar bay six? I need his help with this one," he gave the fighter a kick with his taloned foot.
"Will do." I gave him a bow, which he returned, and continued towards the transport deck.
At the lift a human secretary waved me in from behind a plexiglass barrier. A quick scan in the pre-buffer room and the gas mask chambers unlocked. I went for the green compartment and grabbed my usual mask. A retina scan later and I was through the buffer and post-buffer areas, ascending the spacious lift in solitude. The mask was tied around my neck, accompanying oxygen tank on the back of my right thigh. I didn't really need it yet, but this was my favorite breather. Once I was topside, asking around could lead me to Khomera. I figured he was in a meeting of some sort and that he probably didn't need to be there. He liked to represent the ground forces in meetings, whether their presence was wanted or not. He tells me it's a cultural thing that I can't understand. I said it was a professional thing that I can tolerate. In any case, not knowing the ratio of humans to nonhumans in the meeting means I might have to go through the process of mask allocation on mid-deck. Better to get it over with now.
The lift deposited me at a tram stop, which I queued into and took a seat to wait. Above me was a large red number six, spray painted onto the steel wall. Roughly one hundred and fifty meters down in either direction, hangar bays five and seven could be found as well. At the end of the tram system on the Sparta--that's hangar bay eleven--was a strange machine that lifted tram cars up to the decks. The word 'hangar' is used loosely here, bays one through four and eight through eleven were little more than converted storage areas. There is a series of two hangar bays located on the top deck, but those are used almost exclusively for civilian docking purposes.
I climbed onto the tram and took a seat near the back. Laughing came from a small flotilla of human engineers at the front of the car, and I shifted my gaze towards them. Four blueskins and a red one. The red one was Thomas Gibbens.
"Hey, Tom." He perked up like a deer staring into oncoming headlights and relaxed when he saw my face.
"Hiya Aaron, how 'ya doing?" His voice had a mechanical gruff to it that matched his five o'clock shadow. He looked fatigued, probably headed towards breakfast. I hated to be the bearer of bad news.
"I just talked to Sherek down in bay six, he's got a banged up Serpent and says he needs your help. Got a team of V's with him. Schematic missing a page, maybe?" His nose ruffled in conflicted frustration, one of the blueskins said something that I couldn't make out. Tom shook his head and sighed.
"No, no. I'll go help him out, better him asking me now than winging it and having the 'Serp fuck up in test flight like some rookies do." He gave a sarcastic glare to one of the other engineers, who avoided his gaze. When we approached the next stop, he moved to the door. The same blueskin spoke up.
"You know, Tom. You could at least get something to eat first. Be back in twenty minutes. Come on, man." Tom turned to face him, a rare spark of anger on his brow.
"You think it's fun walking around with a mask on all the time, having everyone stare at you like you're a fucking museum exhibit? Having to work with people who don't give a shit about your skills or a shit about your credentials because they got nothing to do with Earth Fleet fighters? You think that's easy? So, if you got transferred to the R'hovajkh tomorrow, I wouldn't hear you whining about it?" The blueskin was silent, a sheepish look on his face. "Didn't fucking think so." And he was out the door.[/spoiler]
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