Lacuna: The Ashes of Humanity (15 page)

Hours later, Ben was ready to leave. His shuttle—acting on a signal sent from his newly created cyborg mind—flew him away from the Iilan and out into space.

They let him go. He knew they would. The Iilan were traders, merchants peddling their advanced technology; they were not betrayers. They were not the Toralii Alliance.

The Alliance. He hadn't made them pay as he wished, not that he specifically blamed them. He saw no distinction between the Alliance and the Telvan. They were all Toralii, all guilty of innumerable crimes, and only death could pay the wages of their sins.

But these things had to be taken in steps. Using the
Giralan
, he had accomplished significant things; taken a planet, forced the fleets to rise up against him. He'd done something nothing else in the galaxy had managed to do for hundreds of years: frighten the Toralii Alliance. And then he'd been beaten.

It was embarrassing, yes, but it was in equal measure educational. He'd learnt an important lesson from his fiery defeat and subsequent rebirth as a Human.

Brute force wasn't the answer.

His stolen shuttle sailed a respectful distance away from the Iilan ship and then, with a flash, leapt away to a different world.

It was Augara, jewel of the Telvan Empire. A world with a rich biosphere, carpeted in lush green vegetation and shallow oceans full of multicoloured coral.

And its jump points were heavily defended. The shuttle's sensors screamed warnings as a multitude of systems targeted it. His console flashed with an urgent message in the Telvan dialect:
Unknown Telvan shuttle, identify yourself
.

The truth would be a mistake, of course, so as Ben opened the channel—his newly reconstructed vocal chords able to form the words of their language—he chose his words, and his lies, carefully.

["I am Captain Melissa Liao of the Task Force Resolution, speaking to you through an interpreter device. I need to speak to the Worldleader of this planet. It is a matter of urgency."]

He waited. The reply was slow to come, but he was grateful that it came in words, rather than balls of superheated plasma.

["Captain Liao, you honour us with your presence. However, your vessel has been identified as a Telvan shuttle. Belthas IV is a war zone. What business do you have here? Are you the herald of a larger fleet?"]

["All your questions will be answered once I speak to the Worldleader, Defenders of Augara. Please make haste. Time is short."]

Another pause, longer this time. Had he erred? Were the Toralii simply preparing to destroy him?

A swarm of Toralii strike craft flew from the underside of one of the many jump point defence structures, and his windwhisper device spoke again.

["Stand by, Captain Liao, we are escorting you in."]

C
HAPTER
VI

Eden

*****

Planet Velsharn

Velsharn system

S
HE
DIDN
'
T
KNOW
HOW
LONG
she sat there, her finger on the trigger and her eyes closed, waiting for the courage to pull the trigger and end it all, but it was long enough to pass out and fall forward.

She woke up to a gunshot.

Pain exploded all over the right side of her head. She expected to be nothing—dust in the wind metaphorically, brain matter splattered all over her fine wooden desk literally—and to be so quickly woken from sleep made her flail uselessly and then fall off her chair.

Curled in a ball, shouting and cursing, she clutched her head. Her ears were ringing. When the pain faded enough that she could stand, Liao stumbled over to her bathroom, hands bloodied. She turned the mirror towards herself.

The pistol had discharged against her scalp, burning her hair and the skin below, the bullet cutting a groove through her flesh. She was bleeding profusely; no matter how much pressure she applied, the blood kept coming.

Strangely, the blood and pain helped. Physical pain drove the emotional pain away. Temporarily, perhaps, but it did. Almost putting a hole in her head had made her feel better.

Unlike the ethereal Toralii, or problems over overcrowding and undersupply, Liao dealt better with an immediate problem she could solve. This injury she could deal with. She took the first aid kit from her bathroom and withdrew the pressure bandage, pressing it to her wound. It helped, but her medical training told her the truth. A head wound, even a small one, would bleed heavily.

It would need stitches.

She dared not go to Saeed. Not like this. This had to be something she dealt with herself.

Liao didn't hesitate as she rummaged through her drawers, finding her scissors. She went to work on her hair, grabbing it in fistfuls and crudely snipping it away, clearing around the wound site first, cutting as low as she dared. Then, with a needle and thread, Liao turned her head towards the mirror and began stitching her burned skin.

It hurt. More than once, she had to stop and wait until her fingers stopped shaking before she could continue. But the needle went in, made the stitch, and she became accustomed to the pain.

With pressure, time, and the wound closed, the bleeding stopped. Slowly, more carefully, Liao removed all the rest of her hair, cutting it down to a scraggly few centimetres. It couldn't stay that way, so she used her leg razor to shave herself bald, careful to avoid getting hair in her wound.

Her lack of hair would draw attention to herself, but her military cap would hide the wound.
 

She'd shot herself. She'd stitched herself up. That was an interesting symmetry to her. A reflection of her dual role as destroyer and creator.

Liao cleaned up her bathroom as best she could, washing the blood and hair down the drainage pipe, then dared to step back into her main office. The pistol was still lying on the deck of her quarters, surrounded by blood.

So she cleaned that too, scrubbing on her hands and knees, erasing every trace of her blood. She even found the projectile and shell casing, tossing the vile things into her garbage.

For the first time she was grateful there were no marines, but a gunshot would travel far in a ship like this. How many others had heard? Nobody had come to investigate, which both relieved and saddened her.

Nobody had come.

Her logical mind told her that this was good; explaining a negligent discharge to her marines would be difficult, but it didn't change that niggling emotional part of her that, in some ways, wanted to be discovered.

Her tablet chirped. A message from Jul'aran, full of typographical errors. He was clearly using the speech recognition software, and it was still getting used to his voice.

The
Tehran
was due to return, and Jul'aran wanted to make sure the Toralii survivors of Belthas IV would integrate. The language barrier would be a significant problem. After some consideration, Liao sent a message back agreeing to work to implement a bilingualism program. She would ask Saara to teach a class to any willing Telvan survivors.

If they were going to live together, they could not have the population separating into Telvan and Human colonies. Despite their cultural differences, for the time being things would be better if they worked together.

Working with the Toralii. It seemed so hard, and so easy, for her to do. This must have been how Saara felt, healing in the
Beijing
's medical bay, surrounded by aliens. Choosing to work with someone so unlike yourself.

There was only one thing left to do. Her pistol, still resting on the ground. Steeling herself, Liao retrieved it as though it were made of lava. She could not bear to put it in the drawer again so just dropped it on her desk and covered it in paper.

Just as her cap covered her head wound. Liao masked her pain with flimsy coverings, but they were all that she had.

They would have to do for now.

"Company, present arms."

A military funeral on an alien world for their lost crew. The
Sydney
. The pilot of the
Pegasus
. The marines, pilots, and soldiers killed on Belthas IV.

For the billions lost on Earth.

The rain poured down all around her, whipping the trailing edges of Liao's uniform. A dozen marines, comprised of a mix of the Iranians, Chinese, and Americans, even one of the South Korean marines from Belthas IV added as a representative of their nation, raised their rifles and fired into the sky. Their training, discipline, and cohesion was clear. It was a sign of the way things were now; National boundaries, lines on a map, did not separate these people. They were all Human and all in this together.

It was heartening in a way, but they were burying most of their species today. That made it hard to see a positive.

They fired again, then again. Their rifles drowned out the rain for a moment before the dull roar returned.

Ministers said their words, as they had done earlier. She had been asked to speak but could not find any words to successfully articulate how she felt. None of the other captains had spoken, either.

Perhaps they, too, felt that words were unnecessary at this point. Everyone shared their grief.

The
Tehran
, loaded to the brim with Humans and Telvan alike, touched down earlier in the day. The population of their settlement had increased by 3,000 Humans and nearly an equal number of Toralii as the new arrivals joined their numbers. To guide and introduce the newcomers, Shepherd implemented a buddy system. Each new arrival was paired with someone who spoke their language and could show them their meagre facilities. The Telvan arrivals, however, struggled. There were insufficient translators and they ran out of tablets. Liao had spent most of the day with Jul'aran, the two leaders trying to work out what they could do to ease their situation.
 

Despite this, she did not particularly like Jul'aran. He seemed officious, and she suspected he had a temper, but he was thankful for the Human intervention on Belthas IV and dedicated to the future. It was hard to ask more of him than that.

Jul'aran was next to speak. He retold the story of the destruction of the Toralii homeworld of Evarel, a story with which Liao was familiar. Saara had told her. The loss of Evarel was why the Toralii opposed other species possessing the jump technology buried in their cruisers and gunships.

The story didn't seem to resonate with her or many others. They had already lost their world, not because of some bizarre malfunction of technology but through deliberate action of an antagonistic force. In a way, it was almost insensitive, but Liao let it slide. It was a reminder of why the Toralii Alliance had done what they did.

Then a select part of the Iranian crew of the
Tehran
assembled and, despite the pouring rain and the howling wind, sang a
nasheed
. She had never heard one before. It was an a capella chant performed in Persian, starting low but building as more voices added to the song. It rose higher and higher, somehow working with the pounding rain than against it, the music carrying far despite the noise.

The music was beautiful, but they were only able to hear it because the crew of the
Tehran
was Iranian. They had escaped through some miracle of geography where so many others had not. They only had four ships, especially with the
Sydney
destroyed. How much of their culture had been lost?

So many voices from all over the planet were forever silenced. It was sobering, depressing to thinking about, but Liao had always maintained one thing about funerals, and she had been to a few over her career.

Funerals were for the living.

Humans had a fear of death. All creatures did. Funerals were held not for the dead but for those left behind. It was to ease the dark thoughts nibbling at the back of their mind that they, one day, would be dead and forgotten.

They couldn't possibly remember all the Humans who had died on Earth, but Liao tried to keep a few. She brought names and faces to mind, remembering some of them.

Lieutenant Kang Tai. Captain Matthew Knight. Jennifer Pycroft.

They were just names to her. She knew they were living people who had been part of her life, sharing her existence, and now they were dead, but it was hard to see them as anything other than a statistic. She tried and failed. The story of her life.

The
nasheed
ended far too soon for Liao's taste, but when it was done, she was left with a vague sense of emptiness. As if the souls of those who had died were watching them, judging their funeral as one might score a football game. Was everyone sad enough? Were there enough speeches?

The rain eased up as the funeral began to disperse. With over a thousand people standing in the mud and the rain, the logistics of the event were significant, but slowly the crowds filed away. Soon there were just a few hundred people. Then a dozen. One of the marines tried to convince her to leave, but she felt compelled to remain and dismissed him. He had other, more important, things to do.

She did not need to be babysat.

When she was all alone, she said a few words for Allison. She didn't want anyone to overhear—this was just between her and the stars. No people. People talked behind her back. She had been a famous, well-known person on Earth before all of this, and now she was the de facto leader of her species. They thought the guilt of misjudging the Toralii Alliance was affecting her, that the loss of the
Farsight
or the disaster at Belthas IV had broken the camel's back.