Onyx Base
Sothhlva Region
Uiafladus III, Tebazed Unified Governance
October 13, 295
The shuttle touched down with a thud, shaking the compartment. The navy pilot had made his attitude about ferrying civilians clear when we boarded. We were lucky, I suppose; he could have instead revealed a particular attitude about ferrying us
space slugs instead. As it was, though, he merely gave us a rough ride, with a jolt at the end. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure anybody else on the shuttle even noticed.
I waited in my seat for the other passengers to walk, crawl, or, mostly, slide down the aisle and off the shuttle. Primarily they were fellow norillgans, for whom the latter movement description was generally considered proper (“slithered” was another possibility, though that word was frowned upon for its derogatory connotations), but there was a smattering of vailons and other minorities mixed in. Thinking of the norillgans specifically, I wondered how many of these pilgrims would find what they were looking for. I had interviewed dozens of them during our long stay on Tripitit Station, waiting for the war to end. The Commonwealth authorities might have been very displeased to be hosting us, but they also had little appetite for the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of victims of xenocide hoping to return to their former homes at the first available opportunity. Home was, I had found in my interviews, what most of them wanted (at least, among the sample I was able to speak with). Most of the old norillgan civilization had been demolished, swept aside along with the lifeless bodies of billions so that the saathids could have their precious “clean slate,” their terrum novum on which they could write their own vision of a world.
The pilgrims I interviewed hadn’t seemed to understand the scale of the destruction wrought upon their world. Perhaps the scale of the devastation was impossible to comprehend for any individual. They had traveled to Tripitit, and hoped to continue on to our homeworld, retracing the route many of them had used to flee some thirty years ago. They seemed to expect that, in undoing their journeys to refugee camps and, eventually, new homes in the Governance or elsewhere, they would also be undoing the passage of time on their homeworld, that they would be able to return and find everything exactly as it was the day before the first saathid bombs fell. It was inconceivable to them that the world could have changed in their absence.
I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. I knew people like this, grew up around many of them. My parents, thankfully, felt lucky, even blessed, to have escaped the invasion alive. In their old lives, the ones they barely spoke of to me, my father was a writer, my mother an engineer; but when they reached Kampira, they were assigned work as laborers, clear-cutting swaths of virgin jungle because norillgans were theoretically well-suited to tropical environments. My parents had lived in climate-controlled environments within large urban agglomerations for their entire lives up to that point, but I never once heard them complain about their new lives in manual labor or, later on, as small-town shopkeepers. Instead, for my sister and I, the lesson was always that we needed to be grateful for the opportunities afforded to us, when so many others of our species had their lives brutally cut short.
There were others, though, in our little hamlet fifty kilometers and a light-year away from Kampira City, who were not so endlessly grateful. Understandably, they were mistrustful of xenos, ‘aliens’ according to the idiom in old Norillga. Their first contact with intelligent life had traumatized the entire generation in one way or another, left them with scars that would endure for a lifetime. What was less explicable to me was these survivors’ need to pass on their mistrust and their trauma to their children, to hold them apart forever in their new homes. Why should the new generation be forced to carry the burden of the old? All we want to do was live our lives, same as any citizen of the Governance. I am no different than the vailon born on Tebazed, or the mith-fell hatched on Firintarogga, despite my parents’ experiences.
But even as these thoughts bounced around my mind, I knew I was exaggerating my own superiority. I might say that I want to escape from the legacy of xenocide and loss, but there I was, returned to the very place the saathids pursued their unspeakable crimes, with the express purpose of researching and documenting those crimes. Of all the choices I had as a full citizen of the Governance, I had chosen to go back to an imagined homeland too. I was as beholden to the experience of my parents’ generation as were the pilgrims searching for the life they had once known.
It was also true, though, that the pilgrims would have denied my experience as genuine. Framing myself as a fully assimilated citizen of vailon society, as I did a moment ago, was to them a betrayal of the continued existence of the norillgan civilization. To them I was, in a sense, symbolically completing the work that the saathids started. But for the pilgrims it was equally true that those who wished to live apart and keep to the old ways, as well as those who devoted themselves to taking vengeance on the perpetrators, were deeply misguided. When faced with the utter destruction of your species, eternal grief was apparently the only legitimate response. And when they were handed even the faintest glimmer of a chance by their new benefactors to restore something of the old glory, they flocked to the false hope of reconstitution. In this way, they locked themselves behind two lies. First, that they were not survivors looking for their own place in the galaxy, rather that they were the victims of ongoing acts of violence. And second, that returning to their former homes and rebuilding would in some way erase those acts of violence and render them meaningless.
In a sense, I realized as I finally departed the shuttle, I had made my own pilgrimage here in order to demolish those lies, in whatever limited capacity I could contribute.
From the shuttle pad, perched as it was atop a hill in the center of the base, I could see the entire sprawling complex, stretching a kilometer in every direction. In one direction, the military facilities gradually gave way to a civilian town, Jalin; in the other three directions I could see the dense jungle pushing up against the perimeter fence. It is a curious fact that vailons like to build out, not up, in contrast to most known and assumed architectural styles. The spot where I stood was actually the highest point in the entire base, save for the navigation tower guiding air traffic. The admin buildings – headquarters for an entire dragoon with 80,000 soldiers occupying an entire continent – were clustered in the shadow of the town. Even in a small town like this one, the mix of old norillgan and saathid architecture dwarfed the more recent construction by the Governance. Even in dense cities, vailon buildings rarely exceeded five stories; out there, far from the core worlds, I was mildly surprised to see even the handful of multi-story buildings.
Most of the other passengers were descending from the pad to my right, towards the transportation depot. A few were laying flat on the ground as they prayed to the old gods; others were weeping openly at the sight of their former home. I watched them for a moment before I started down the hill myself, in the direction of the admin buildings. On the way, I slid past a polyglot collection of xenos in the middle of the normal daily routine of a military base. Mechanics doing maintenance on vehicles and other equipment. Squad-level units poring over maps. A mess hall. A shooting range. There were mith-fell and hissma, pelx and pithoks. Mirovandians with their stalks towering over their comrades. Even a scattered few sathori, far from their own homeworld in the opposite corner of the galaxy. They were all citizens of the Tebazed Unified Governance, doing their duty for the state, defending the rights and freedoms of their fellow citizens. Despite being born inside the borders of the Governance, I was not quite like them. I was set apart, like all norillgans in the TUG. Most refugees who arrived in vailon space, whether displaced by war or famine or political happenstance/circumstance, were granted a direct path to full-citizen rights within a few years. Crucially, nothing in domestic or interstellar law prevented those migrants from retaining their old citizenship rights alongside their new ones. Not so for the norillgan diaspora. We were in limbo, held there deliberately by a regime of interstellar law that had not foreseen the possibility of a pre-FTL civilization being eradicated, as well as by our own political leadership that continued to insist that the old norillgan polities would be resurrected in some form. When asked to choose between immediate citizen rights in the Governance and the possibility, however remote, of returning to the way things were, of returning to their old status in society, our so-called leaders chose the latter. Thus, even though I was born in the Governance, was educated in a Governance cohort with a vailon teacher and Governance-approved curriculum, even though I was now a member of the Governance’s own Directorate, the sprawling bureaucratic entity that constituted most day-to-day economic and social activity in the state, I was not a proper citizen of the Governance.
After a ten-minute slide through the base, I arrived at Administration E, where I was supposed to meet my guide. A hissma corporal at the desk in the lobby sent me to see a cyggan lieutenant on the second floor, who sent me to a vailon major back on the first, who, after making me wait for three-quarters of a standard hour, told me I needed to see a Major Xabinax, over in Admin H. Another ten-minute slide found me at the correct building, this one humming with activity as many individuals hurried in and out. A short wait and finally I was granted my audience.
The major was a pithok, a relatively rare sight given their communal nature and their tendency to remain close to their families. “Yes, come in,” he said, accompanied by a hand gesture indicating the seat across the desk from him, all without looking up from the document he was reading. This would have been considered incredibly rude in the pre-war norillgan culture, but I wasn’t raised in the old society.
“Major Xabinax, thank you for seeing me.” I said by way of greeting. I did not take the offered seat, as it was designed for bipedal species.
“And you are…” he said slowly, as he finished reading the printout in front of him and turned to his holo display, “Fern-ee.” He stumbled badly over my name.
“I’m sorry, major, but it’s actually ‘Fern’uni,’” I corrected him gently.
“Fern-ooni?”
“Close enough.”
“Okay.” He typed something into his holo-display before finally turning to face me. “Sorry about that. So it says you’re here about obtaining a permit to enter a combat zone, yes?” His voice clicked and buzzed, a common physiological feature of arthropoidal species.
“I actually already have a permit. The Directory issued it to me, with proper approvals, before I left Tripitit Station.” I fetched the document out of my bag to show him.
“Which Directory?”
“Oh, ah, Science. I’m at the First Bessemar Institute of Higher Learning. And I’m only going into a restricted zone, not a combat zone.”
The major took the document from me. “That’s a very good school. What are you studying?”
“Thank you,” I said, to the implicit compliment. “I’m working on the legacy of lost civilizations and generational traumas. Hence my presence here.”
Major Xabinax nodded but didn’t immediately reply, instead turning his eyes back to the form I had given him. “Hmmm. Well, Tebazed can issue whatever cease-fire proclamations they want; on the ground here everywhere beyond the fence is a combat zone.” He held up the document next to his holo-display, evidently comparing the two. “Ah, I see,” he exclaimed, apparently having found the discrepancy. “The district you’re heading to was redesignated as Delta-2 yesterday.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not supposed to let you go there. Wait,” he said, holding a hand up as I started to object. “I’m not actually going to try to stop you. But you should be aware of the situation before you go.”
This confused me. “Isn’t the war over?”
“Only in the technical sense.”
“I thought they announced a truce.”
“They did.”
“And their armies retreated.”
“Yes, sure.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
The major’s antennae twitched, I believe in a manner to suggest sympathy for my naivete. My interactions with pithoks had been limited in the past. “In the army, we like to talk about ‘facts on the ground.’”
“Okay,” I replied uncertainly.
The major continued. “To a navy, things are easy. If a ship fires on you, it is the enemy and you fire back. If there’s a treaty peace, the enemy ships won’t fire on you anymore and you won’t fire on them. But an individual ship is both too small and too big to go rogue. Too small, because it’ll get destroyed the first time it runs across a patrol squadron; that’s a lot of firepower to lose in a single engagement for an insurgent group. And too big for any but the largest outfits to steal and operate with any effectiveness.”
I could sense him building momentum, so I didn’t interrupt.
“Planetside, it’s a totally different world. Easy enough for a retreating army to leave behind small units to ambush patrols and attack supply lines and generally make it very hard to maintain a peace. Even a few disgruntled civilians can band together, make an occupying force miserable. On the ground, against a hostile population who know the territory better than you, pacification is an ongoing operation, not something decreed with a keystroke. But, as the junior branch, we report up to navy command. The admirals are like easily distracted children: show them a shiny new warship and they’ll forget that there’s a whole planet to be garrisoned.”
I had a lot of questions about the soliloquy, but I pushed them down in my mind so that we could stay focused. “What does that mean for me? Are you saying there’s still active fighting in the area?”
“It’s low-grade stuff but yes. Just yesterday, a sniper wounded a colonel in 3rd infantry, a patrol was ambushed and their exoskeletons taken, and several civilians were shot in Asbe. And it’s small-scale action, not really anything we can actively defend against. My fear is that you’ll make a juicy target for the partisans, both because you represent the civilian government and your, ah, personal status.”
“Have the partisans been targeting pilgrim groups?”
“It’s hard to say for certain. We’ve tried to keep a pretty tight watch on them, because we expect a lot of fury to be directed their way. So attacks on the main pilgrim groups and sites have been rare. But we can only do so many show-of-force exercises, and when your friends wander away from the heavily trafficked areas we have seen them attacked in a way to suggest deliberate targeting.”
“But you’re letting me go anyway.”
“Not alone.” The major leaned over to his intercom. “Would you please have Sergeant Pathir join us?”
“I was told I would be meeting up with a Major Vakor. She was going to be my guide. Where is she?” My frustration was beginning to boil over, but the major’s combination of affability and mild indifference blunted it.
“Yes, well, Major Vakor had to go outside the fence this morning, attending to an incident in Skom. Sergeant Pathir will escort you – ah, yes, come in,” the major said after a knock interrupted him. I turned to see a vailon soldier, presumably this Sergeant Pathir, enter the cramped office. He was tall for a vailon, maybe 1.7 meters, an effect emphasized by his asymmetric horns – his left horn was significantly shorter and looked as if it had been badly damaged in the recent past.
The major continued, indicating each of us in turn with his antennae. “Sergeant Pathir, Fern-ooni. Sergeant, your orders are to take your squad and escort this civilian over the fence, where you are to rendezvous with Major Vakor at Skom. She will have further instructions for you at that time, but anticipate further escort duty.”
Part of me wanted to interject and say it wouldn’t be necessary, but I refrained. Some protection actually sounded like a prudent course of action.
“Transport?” Sergeant Pathir wanted to know. His voice was gravelly, much more so than most vailons.
“You can check out an armored four-wheeler from the motor pool. Authorization code….” The major checked the holo-display again. “Alpha-three-seven-Charlie.”
“Alpha-three-seven-Charlie, thank you, sir,” the sergeant confirmed.
“Alright, sergeant,” the major replied, and the vailon turned to go. I began to follow him, assuming the dismissal was for both of us, but the major stopped me. “Don’t forget this,” he said, holding out my permit, now stamped with the proper approval mark.
I took it from and put in into my bag. “Thank you.”
“When you return, I’d like to sit down with you and have a look at your research, see if there’s anything I can add,” he continued.
I was surprised, having interpreted his indulgent attitude to mean that he wasn’t particularly interested in my work. Of course, he might have actually wanted to sanitize some of my conclusions, but it was hard to tell. “Sure!” was about all I could muster.
His antennae twitched again, but I missed the implication. “And be careful out there. Listen to Sergeant Pathir, and don’t do anything stupid.” I nodded my acknowledgement. “You’ll be fine,” he concluded with an air of finality.