Black Hawks From a Blue Sun Page 2

  Nine armed and armored soldiers stroll onto the bridge, and lift their faceplates. Elation shines from their weathered faces, and they bear the Colonists to their shoulders like glorious heroes, hooting and shouting back to base. The Colonists get caught up in the excitement, grinning and laughing as they are jostled along.

  An impromptu meeting of the entire enclave is called by the Cadre’s Leadership Council. The meeting is tender and joyous until Thompson steps forward, announcing his crime. To the enclave, it is a despicable thing for one human to kill another, and the judgment is exile.

  Amid the chaos, the Colonist Officers intervene on Thompson, Argo, and Maiella’s behalf, sparing the soldiers from death by exile. In so doing, they draw a line between the Colonists and the enclave, which marks the first of numerous cultural clashes.

  Where the Colonists have been rotating skeleton crews (with the rest in cryogenic suspension), they are much as they were before Earth was attacked: shorter, less muscular, great variety of body types and ethnicities. Moreover, their archives remain packed with data on their ancient home world—data the enclave has lost or forgotten.

  The enclave soldiers, with their bulging frames, rigid code, and homogenous ethnicity, have evolved along a very different path; and they are confounded by the Colonists’ “irrelevant values” of self-determination, civil liberties, and private property.

  While the two societies grind against one another, Argo, Maiella, and Thompson fall into a deep melancholy. Being denied their rightful fate of exile, they are forced to live with their guilt reflected daily in the faces of their peers. The melancholy takes such root it affects their work performance, leading to costly mistakes. Unable to tolerate the mistakes any longer, General O’Kai is ready to “reconstitute” them into lobotomized drones.

  The colonist Counselor (valued by the Cadre’s Leadership Council for his selfless devotion to others) meets with the General, discussing the depressed and failing trio at length. Gradually, the Counselor pries open O’Kai’s mind to the concept of Psychology and convinces him the faltering soldiers can be restored. It will require a task of great difficulty, great hardship, and great service to the enclave, the Counselor reasons. In such a task, the convicted soldiers would not allow themselves to fail.

  In the ironic moment, the General realizes the Counselor is advocating the team’s exile, after all, but with purpose. They will go to Earth and report her condition, enemy strength, and the possibility of Humanity’s return. Appreciating the Counselor’s acumen, the General agrees and initiates the projects necessary.

  While Thompson and Argo are deemed fit for the mission, Maiella is not. Damage to her Human Digital Interface[1] by a faulty cryogenic sleep recliner leaves her at lowered operating capacity. A new “Geek” is ordered to replace her in the team.

  Isolated by the enclave, despised for her crime, and denied her rightful fate, Maiella nearly goes mad. Only the intervention of the Counselor saves her from being lobotomized, and he takes her into his protective custody aboard the Colony Ship.

  Though Maiella cannot go with her teammates, the Counselor brilliantly negotiates her placement as project auditor of the new mission-essential hardware. He knows that without meaningful work, she will collapse mentally, physically, and emotionally. He also knows no one will be as thorough testing and proving the equipment to ensure the safety of her dear comrades, Argo and Thompson.

  Filling Maiella’s place with Argo and Thompson is a new Geek, named Beckert. Though lacking Maiella’s operational experience, he embodies all of the recent advancements in enclave technology, genetics, and training.

  It shreds Maiella’s heart to see her comrades go. She gives Argo and Thompson a fond farewell and explains how she instilled everything she knew into Beckert so at least a part of her will be with them. Beckert’s woeful glance at her confirms just how hard she trained him.

  With stern resolve and little ceremony, Argo, Beckert, and Thompson pack into their heavily-modified one-way transport and depart for the never-before-seen planet, Earth. Their mission objectives are to report enemy presence, to discover exploitable weaknesses, and to sow destruction until killed.

  PART THREE

  Suovetaurilia

  A gentle tone cycles from low to high.

  Thompson’s eyes roam behind their lids until the lids part like tearing tissue paper. He blinks hard, driving the haze from his vision, and takes in the numerous control panels surrounding him. The screens, interfaces, and consoles are illuminated in soothing green. Disorientation is fleeting, and memory rushes back to him.

  The mission…Earth…we must be close.

  The slightest hint of condensation covers his armor, evaporating rapidly. His limbs tingle with restored sensation and he braces for the surge of agony that follows.

  It does not come.

  The tingling subsides and feeling extends into his extremities. A brief shudder passes his length, but no searing nerve endings like before, no partially thawed limbs, no period of bewilderment, just warmth coursing through him.

  His lungs draw a deep breath of the cabin’s cold air and he coughs harshly.

  “Good morning, Major,” says a young man’s voice.

  Thompson rubs his face and looks at Beckert to his left. It appears the Geek has been awake for some time. Thompson flexes his arms, marveling at how surprisingly good he feels after awakening from cryosleep.

  “Morning, Geek.”

  A clang to Thompson’s right draws his attention, and he sees Argo leaning forward, his big hands clamped around the recliner rails. The Brick’s eyes are crushed shut in the anticipation of agony.

  Thompson watches with amused interest as Argo’s expression dissolves into confusion. The Brick releases the recliner rails and stares into his hands, flexing them over and over. He clears his lungs and looks over at his comrades.

  “What the…?”

  “A little better than usual?” Thompson asks.

  Argo blinks at the Gun’s phenomenal understatement. “Yeah. It is.” He marvels at the reengineered cryosleep recliner, remembering the old ones and how their wake-up process was like being electrocuted while dunked in molten steel.

  “The Colonists know their craft,” Argo says with equal understatement.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant,” Beckert calls from across the cabin. Argo nods back.

  “Morning, Sergeant.”

  Thompson enters a code into his console and pulls up several diagnostic windows. “How long have you been awake, Geek?”

  “Twenty-two hours, fifty-three minutes.”

  “Why so long?”

  “Reconnaissance, sir. The Colonist maps are, uh, inaccurate.”

  Thompson calls up an image of their planetary destination, and a three dimensional globe renders above his console in false hues of blue, white, green and brown.

  “What’s different?”

  “The land masses are smaller,” Beckert reports, “differently shaped. Looks like the oceans have risen.”

  Thompson’s mind staggers at the thought of an ocean of water. Cadre One has stores of ten million liters, carefully conserved via recycling and collection, but the combined volume of Earth’s oceans is over a trillion billion liters. The quantity is scarcely conceivable.

  Clearing himself of the fascination, Thompson pulls up a second globe based on the Colonist maps and slides it into the globe of current data, aligning them so the continents overlap. Spinning the merged globes proves what Beckert described: the coastlines have all retreated to varying degrees.

  “That narrows our options,” Argo says.

  Thompson taps more keys on the console, plotting all the potential sites of interest for investigation. Hundreds of red dots appear, almost all of them offshore under several meters of water.

  “Major, I’m also tracking 847 objects in orbit.” Beckert sends the data to Thompson’s console, where the points plot in indigo around the globe. “Most are only a few meters long, but one is over two kilometers
and it seems to be the focus of most of the activity.”

  “Show me,” Thompson orders.

  Beckert highlights a dense cluster of blue dots and magnifies them. At the center is an oblong vessel with a blunt, squared-off bow. It thickens toward the middle then tapers slightly before flaring to its widest at the stern. Long bulges press out from the hull, close together yet not overlapping, giving the entire vessel a muscular appearance.

  Thompson fixates on the enormous vessel, admiring its polished curves. “That one’s almost twice the size of the Europa.” His eyes fall on the ring of smaller ships around it. Though over 600 meters long themselves, they are dwarfed by their central companion.

  “What are these ships around the big one? Are they in our catalog?”

  Argo studies the ships in his console, collecting as much data as possible. “Looks like a variant of a heavy cruiser class, but the silhouette is different. These have long struts at the bow and broader sterns. Must be a new model.”

  Thompson rubs his chin. “Keep up your analysis. See what you can find out.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Geek, do we have a landing site?”

  Beckert turns to his leader, looking through the code streams in his goggles.

  “I’d welcome your suggestions, sir.”

  Thompson contemplates the large ship with its escorts. Hundreds of tiny vessels swarm around them, ferrying back and forth between the dozens of other large ships in the area and the planet below. No question, something big is going on. The target-rich location intrigues him with possibility, but, with all the military hardware present, it would be a short-lived investigation.

  “Let’s get away from all that activity,” Thompson says.

  He spins the globe around to look at the land masses on the far side. A great northern continent extends from a polar ocean down to a narrow isthmus near the equator. Below the isthmus, a large continent extends toward the southern pole, narrowing to a curved horn at its tip. A few red dots mark the southern continent, almost all of them under water.

  With the flick of a finger, Thompson rotates the globe to the northern continent. Unlike the southern continent, which has retained its basic shape, many prominent features of the northern continent are gone. Peninsulas, river deltas, and islands have receded or disappeared entirely. A large section of the western coastline has disappeared at a geologic fault. And a long promontory of land at the southeastern corner is completely submerged. Even so, red dots pepper the full length of the land mass, leaving a wide assortment from which to choose.

  “Geek, do we have any data on enemy settlements?”

  “Affirmative.” Beckert plots hundreds of new points on the globe in white. They form a thick band around the middle of the planet, every one of them planted on the present shoreline.

  “So many…” Thompson’s eyes drift over the globe before him, bouncing back and forth between different areas. “Seems they prefer low latitudes...warm, wet environments.”

  “Sir,” Beckert calls, “once we hit atmo, we’ll be visible and any course corrections will give us away. If we hope to simulate a random meteor, we need to select a landing zone right away.”

  Thompson stares hard into the globe. He spins it back and forth, magnifying and minimizing areas in his search. He considers proximity to enemy settlements, terrain, mission-essential objectives.

  He opens a second window and instructs the computer to prioritize the points of interest with all of the mission relevant factors, removing any that are currently underwater. To his dismay, almost all of the red dots disappear. The remainder are nestled close to large enemy settlements.

  One dot, however, stands alone on the coast of the northern continent, roughly half way up the eastern seaboard. A line extends from it to the secondary window where matched criteria are listed: government centers, infrastructure, population centers, military installations, cultural centers. The nearest enemy settlement is thirty kilometers south.

  He enlarges the area and finds a mountain range with multiple folds and valleys less than a hundred kilometers north-west.

  “Geek, set co-ordinates 40 degrees North latitude, 78 degrees West longitude. Bring us down into one of the valleys. We should have some good cover there.”

  “Copy that, Major.” Beckert’s goggles flare with activity and the craft thrusts to its new trajectory.

  As he waits, Thompson switches the rendered globe before him for a view in real time. A swirling orb, bright with yellow sunlight, hangs magnificent and inviting on screen. Though the planet is distant, the sight of it strikes him off balance. Here is the ancestral home of humanity—lost for centuries, forgotten as an unattainable dream. His analytical mind could easily dissect the forces at work in the cyclonic weather systems, yet there is something greater he perceives beyond the sum of the planetary constituents. If anyone asked, he would be at a loss to describe the unusual sensation, except to say it is familiar. Like when the Counselor tried to explain the concept of art during the Europa’s long voyage to Cadre One…

  For hours, Thompson watched the Counselor display image after image of flawed, low resolution depictions. Some were humans dressed in bizarre outfits, engaged in pursuits of zero productivity. Other images were of buildings, or earthly landscapes, old sea vessels and the like. True, there was some appreciable skill in rendering such images by hand, but why bother? A photo was millions of times more accurate and required only milliseconds to produce.

  The Counselor shook his head again and again, frustrated by Thompson’s refusal to understand. He pushed back from the console and chewed his lower lip, studying his obstinate pupil. Suddenly, he leaned forward and summoned an image as if to punish his student.

  “Let’s see what you think of this one!”

  The Counselor pulled up a file titled, “Ascending and Descending by M. C. Escher”. A black and white drawing illuminated the screen, showing the top of a square building. A continuous staircase connected at all four corners with several pedestrians climbing and descending. Thompson folded his arms and scoffed until he noticed the stairway continued infinitely up or down, depending on direction of travel.

  “But… that’s impossible!”

  He leaned forward and stared at the visual paradox. The lines of perspective on each leg of the staircase were accurate. Even the support structure of the building below was accurate.

  “This can’t be!”

  “Well, there it is, Thompson. What do you think of that?”

  “I… I don’t know what to think.”

  “But you feel something, don’t you?”

  Thompson tried to blank his expression, but the perplexed fascination was still there.

  The Counselor’s shoulders rounded as if a great weight was removed. “That, my friend, is the purpose of art.”

  Thompson smiles at the memory. It proved the gateway to appreciating form without function, the appreciation of beauty. As deep a revelation as it was, it was not nearly so profound as what he feels now, looking at the swirling, vibrant planet growing ever closer.

  “Gun,” Argo calls, “I need you and Beckert to lie back in your recliners a moment.”

  Thompson stirs himself from his distraction, hoping the others did not notice.

  “Sure.”

  Beckert sits back into his recliner as well, and Argo runs comprehensive diagnostics on them both. All the while, the image of Earth grows larger in Thompson’s screen. He watches it compulsively.

  “All right,” Argo announces, “looks good.”

  Thompson turns to the young Geek. “Any contacts in our flightpath?”

  “Already accounted for, Major. We’ll approach over the northern polar region and hit atmosphere over land at high latitude. That’ll put the fewest enemy eyes on us during descent.”

  The Gun stares into his screen. “Brick, are you saving data on the planet?”

  “Affirmative,” the big man replies. His large hands dance over his console, pouring data streams i
nto his docked labset: meteorology, topography, magnetic field, planetary albedo, aerosols, gaseous composition, land forms, gravity, density, temperature, every bit of information the craft’s sensors can convey.

  “Final course correction and deceleration on my mark…” Beckert’s goggles pulse with instruction. “Three…two…one…Mark.”

  The cabin buzzes with energy and small blue sparks pop at the consoles’ edges. More than just weightless, the three men feel insubstantial as the inertial damping field surrounds them. Beckert triggers the final burn and the craft slows radically. When the field dissipates, Thompson shakes his head.