Post by stratomunchkin on Feb 6, 2010 21:42:40 GMT 1
Rated - T - for violence and language.
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence — spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials — but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an on going succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-second century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. And some stopped alltogether. And yet, history never said that everyone had to stop where those had done. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires.
The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered — or adapted to — they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive.
Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory, but the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, even after the War of the First Contact, most people had more or less settled down into a milder Sagan-esque state, still living on Earth or on colonies easily in reach of a Mass Relays.
Still, war, war never changes, and the cycle of day and night in the galaxy has seen many a civilization rise and fall, even though some have tried to play policeman to the lawlessness of it all, including the prevention of 'murder'. But the reality is anything but that nice metaphor.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends.
-- taken and slightly edited from: Peter Watts (2006): Blindsight
Mayfair, Outer Edges of the Attican Traverse,
2184 C.E.
Mayfair was, on the scale of galactic events and place, an insignificant spot. Remarkable only for the fact that it was one of only a few habitable planets ever to be found in the life-sustaining zone of a rare combination of an orange K-class star and a bright F-class star twice the radius of Sol, the tropical world bore less mineral ressources than the inhospitable balls of rock and gas accompaying it in its wide ellyptic path around its two stars. Fifteen hundred years ago the Asari had briefly held possession of it, considering it a target for eventual colonization, but the Rachni Wars and the Krogan Rebellions had put an end to those plans. Corporations had dug for titanium and platinum and copper on it during the following centuries, but the planetary crust had never yielded enough of a result to justify a permanent presence. A dozen times or more Mayfair had changed hands and name, until six years ago human settlers had become the last in the long line of owners.
The afternoon sky had a tint of a purple haze in it, courtesy of the icy rings of Gluskap, named after a mythical giant of the Algonquin tribe back on Earth. Slowly, the helium-methane giant crawled over the treeline on the horizon, the light of two suns making the giant white spot of a methane storm thousands of kilometres in diameter on its northern pole look like a flaring, angry eye. The air on Mayfair, at least close to the small town of the same name, was almost standing still, appearing almost like a hot and humid curtain to those unfamiliar with the climate.
Harald Jefferson leaned his head back, sniffing for the vanishing traces of ozone in the air. It was always this still this time of the month, the quiet before the storms that Gluskap's passing entailed, the massive white and purple ball somewhat wreaking havoc on Mayfair's tidal system. Visitors, as uncommon as they were, often covered under the tables when the winds howled outside with almost 150 kilometres per hour, but Jefferson slept exceptionally well during those nights. Mayfair's biosphere had longs since adapted to the gas giant passing by twice every one and a half years, its plants having deep and solid roots.
The engineered crops the colonists planted also weathered those storms well enough, though they still had to import fertilizer every year. Mayfair was a small colony, the last census showing a population of just about 1,800 people, most of them farmers who had come here together with reverend Walther Xian, getting away from the Alliance to lead a self-determined life. They still sent a patrol frigate through the system every three months or so, but the people here never had had any problems with pirates or slavers of greedy corporations, and Harald Jefferson at elast was more than happy that they stayed away. The Alliance always meddled in people's lifes, always attracted trouble and opposition. Now, they most certainly had no need of the Alliance and all the baggage it entailed.
Especially in the light of the events on the Citadel and what happened after them Jefferson was more than happy to be on Mayfair, he thought, walking through a field of genengineered wheat, feeling the top of the plants with his palms. No, this here was a simple life, a peaceful life.
A gust of wind ripped him from his thoughts, the slap of warm air putting an irritated frown on his stoic, high-jawed ebony face. It was too early for the wind to fresh up! Now that could become a problem with the harvest if-
With a deafening roar a wave of pressurized air threw him off his feet, flattening the crops he had been thinking about. It was followed by the high-pitched whine of running engines and the low, vibrating hum of machinery as a stub-nosed, short-winged starship almost leisurely maneuvered only a few hundred feet above him towards the town. The whine intensified fast, until he had to shield his ears in fear of his eardrums bursting, then three blue bolts erupted from the vessel's bow, almost too fast to make out. An explosion, dwarfing all the noise the descending starship made by several magnitudes, rocked the ground, and a small mushroom cloud of dust and debris and fire erupted from the middle of the colony.
Town hall and the comm tower, Jefferson registered in a dazed calm. He should be panicked, he knew, should do something, but fear and surprise kept him pinned to the ground, watching the grey and red-painted ship slowly approach the neat settlement, like a confident predator walking towards a cornered prey, brandishing its fangs. The ship fired again, this time from its port side, a small thin stream of whitish blue sweeping across main street. This time the explosions were small and spread out, and he could hear the rumble that a mass of panicked people was bound to create. Detaching a host of smaller vehicles, the ship took up a position right above Mayfair's town greens.
Harald Jefferson scrambled to his feet, shaking off the daze, and darted off towards the town, to his house and family. Behind him, like appearing out of Gluskap's angry eye, another ship shot across the hoirzon towards the colony, trailing ionized air around it like a blazing ring. It was the same type as the one already hanging above the besieged town, and had Jefferson looked up he would have made out a large name painted on its hull in batarian script, alongside a multitude of apparently hand-written taunts in the same language.
Two hours later, silence reigned in the empty streets and houses of Mayfair, its open spaces littered with debris and corpses as both suns slowly set on the horizon.
It was one of twenty-three colonies in the Traverse and the Terminus Systems hit that day.
Amazonas Metroplex, Earth,
Systems Alliance, 2184 C.E.
The irritating whine of the overburdened air conditioning almost drowned the background chatter of the wall-covering television screen of the gloomy appartment. If you had served more than half of your conscious life aboard starships in an arid environment where temperatures always hovered between 18 and 20° Celsius, settling down again in the tropical heat and humidity of South America's Amazonas Basin was a major undertaking. Not that arl Amos Kenyon had tried very hard to adapt so far. His appartment was a mess, and that only if one was very generous. Take home food packages littered the floor and most other level spaces of the cubic box hardly fit to be called home, as did beer cans and dirty laundry. With the sun-blinds down twenty-four seven and the lights out he spent his waking ours in a murky twilight in front of the flickering screen. There were weekly power outages, times when the nets' just went blank for a few seconds, but he did not care much about that. After all, this was not the Sao Paolo Ritz, but rather just one step above the slums circling the metroplex in all directions.
With his meager pension could not afford more than that. Hell, he was lucky he had that meager pension after the discharge! Lieutenant-Commander Carl Amos Kenyon had been only a step away from receiving the command of a brand new frigate when his whole carreer had come tumbling down like a house of cards.
Four months ago the ship he had served on, the SSV Utah, had brought up a turian merc they had traced back to several pirate attacks on the fringes of Alliance space. Kenyon had been the leader of the boarding party when the destroyer had gone alongside the privateer. Knowing he would get blown to pieces in a stand-up fight, the turian had complied with their orders to shut down his drive and let them come aboard.
It had all been dreary routine until they had reached the cargo bay.
Amos Kenyon was no rookie. He had been in the navy since his eighteenths birthday twenty two years ago, and during his carreer he had brought up or witnessed the destruction of more ships than he could count on his fingers. Slavers, pirates, mercs – he had seen it all. Still, he had not been prepared for what awaited him in the twilight of the cargo holds of the Palas. Unnaturally thin faces. Empty eyes. Flies and maggots. The smell of urine and shit and death everywhere. A starving batarian infant crying, sucking at the rotting teet of his dead mother. Half dead people, no, shadows of people everywhere, herded into metal cages half as tall as himself, left to rot for days and days. And in the middle of it, a smug turian, waving a shipping manifesto proclaiming the legality of what he was doing under contract law.
The Westerlund News crew that had been aboard the Utah for publicity reasons had puked their guts out already by then and was busy filming again. Like vultures, he thought. He still had the clip on disc, the raw as well as the edited version. A souvenir, evidence from his military trial. The narration on it sounded almost excited as it talked about how he had executed the ship's captain and the crewmembers who had been with him in the cargo bay, a couple of batarians, in a fit of furious rage. Quite unlike the disgust and panic and shrill fear of the real thing. Quite unlike the nothing he had felt as he had done it. Nothing at all. Walking up to them, he had unholstered his sidearm and shot each of the three in the face at point blank range, then calmly handed over his gun to the nearest marine and ordered them all to call in all the Utah's medical staff to look after the 'cargo'.
He knew he was not above the law. That had never been the question. But he had been on the job long enough to know how nine in ten of such cases actually worked out. As foreign nationals were involved, lenient sentences were pronounced, ships confiscated – and two years later they would be back in business, quite often with a vengeance. No, he could not have let that happen again, not this time, even if it meant his carreer, his freedom.
But the turian captain had been a decorated military veteran, a man with connections. The whole case became political, if only behind the scenes. The Navy did its best to keep the news from spreading, exploiting loopholes in the contract it had signed with Westerlund News, effectively bullying them into silence. The turians also were quieted after threats surfaced to link one of their own with the conditions, conveniently available on film, on the Palas. But there was bad blood, and he was guilty anyway. In fact, he got off light for what he had done.
The compromise was a face-saver for all concerned, but it left him adrift. No other experience than soldiering, and a black mark on his vita. Nowhere to go. So he drowned in his own apathy.
A series of images showing starships flashed across the wide screen, and he instinctively focussed on them, but just for a second. It was an add for the Navy, showing obviously tinkered battle footage, proud men and women in uniform, music and a narrator's voice full of pathos. It was ridiculous. At least they had stopped using Shephard's face or it, going with some randomized image nowadays that most certainly originated from a VI programme factoring in the most likely demographic groups susceptible for the intended message. Propaganda for a glass-jawed tiger.
His gaze flickered over the garbage piling up in his room. Nobody visited him, and he hardly went outside anyway. There was no need to get rid of the trash. He had done that four months ago.
No, he had no family, and most the people he knew professionally were on duty somewhere in the galaxy, and even then, he was no officially a civilian. God, how he hated it. There were times when he wished there had been a firefight aboard the Palas and he had gone down then and there. He felt useless, a tool discarded off before its time. He had tried to drink those thoughts away, with little success. Lately, he found himself thinking more often about the gun in the top shelf of his drawer. A foolish thought, he knew, but a persistent one.
The appartment's comm console started beeping aggressively in an unintelligible melody that seemed to pierce his frontal lobes. Irritatedly, he grabbed an empty can of beer and threw it against it, silencing the damn thing. Leaning out of his filthy armchair he grabbed himself a fresh can of beer, shaking his head. He really needed to change the ring tone on the fuckin' comm terminal to something that did not come close to killing him. Placing the can against his lips, he took a couple of deep, long pulls. Arising the bother him anew, the comm console got him in the middle of it, almost making him choke on the luke-warm beer in his hands, sloshing beer and beer foam all over himself and the goddamn chair. With a half-full can of beer in one hand and nothing heavy enough in reach of his other hand he yielded up to his fate and walked over to the flashing piece of technology, groaning, and pushed the most prominent button on it.
There was a momentary delay before the actual connection was established that brought him to full attention. An encrypted call, for him? A serious face with high jawbones and well-trimmed whiskers appeared on screen, and Kenyon instinctively stood at attention. Fransciso 'Napoleon' Bautista's hawkish face seemed as it had been chiselled from Martian granite, not showing one ounce of emotion.
“How are you doing, son?” the captain of the SSV Utah and his former commanding officer asked cordially.
“I'm... rather busy, Sir,” Kenyon lied, tilting his head to the left while he unconsciously scratched his stubble. “Looking for a job, getting the rent payed,” he frowned as he saw the man on the other side just nodding, taking the lies in one stride. That was quite unlike his former commander. Not taking his eyes of Bautista's face he used his left hand to bring up a sub-menu on the console that allowed him the data tracer of the call. And all he got was heavily encrypted garble.
“With little luck, as I am told,” the uniformed man stated casually, causing Kenyon to avert his gaze.
“Ah, Sir, I am thankful for your call, but I really have a lot of things on my mind right now.”
Fransciso 'Napoleon' Bautista simply nodded again.
“I am sorry for what happened to you, son. But this here's no life for you, either. You need to get back into space. And I'm willing to get you there.”
That got him Amos' full attention.
“I'm listening,” he tried to keep his voice level.
“A high-risk mission, fishing in the dark. Small team, independent work, no back-up from the Alliance so there's plausible deniability,” the captain explained. “Specialists who get things done without caring for the rules or consequences,” he smiled. “We call them the Corsairs.”
Amos Kenyon thought of the gun in his drawer, then a thin smile crept on his face.
“I'm in, sir.”
P R O L O G U E
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence — spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials — but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an on going succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-second century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. And some stopped alltogether. And yet, history never said that everyone had to stop where those had done. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires.
The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered — or adapted to — they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive.
Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory, but the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, even after the War of the First Contact, most people had more or less settled down into a milder Sagan-esque state, still living on Earth or on colonies easily in reach of a Mass Relays.
Still, war, war never changes, and the cycle of day and night in the galaxy has seen many a civilization rise and fall, even though some have tried to play policeman to the lawlessness of it all, including the prevention of 'murder'. But the reality is anything but that nice metaphor.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends.
-- taken and slightly edited from: Peter Watts (2006): Blindsight
Mayfair, Outer Edges of the Attican Traverse,
2184 C.E.
Mayfair was, on the scale of galactic events and place, an insignificant spot. Remarkable only for the fact that it was one of only a few habitable planets ever to be found in the life-sustaining zone of a rare combination of an orange K-class star and a bright F-class star twice the radius of Sol, the tropical world bore less mineral ressources than the inhospitable balls of rock and gas accompaying it in its wide ellyptic path around its two stars. Fifteen hundred years ago the Asari had briefly held possession of it, considering it a target for eventual colonization, but the Rachni Wars and the Krogan Rebellions had put an end to those plans. Corporations had dug for titanium and platinum and copper on it during the following centuries, but the planetary crust had never yielded enough of a result to justify a permanent presence. A dozen times or more Mayfair had changed hands and name, until six years ago human settlers had become the last in the long line of owners.
The afternoon sky had a tint of a purple haze in it, courtesy of the icy rings of Gluskap, named after a mythical giant of the Algonquin tribe back on Earth. Slowly, the helium-methane giant crawled over the treeline on the horizon, the light of two suns making the giant white spot of a methane storm thousands of kilometres in diameter on its northern pole look like a flaring, angry eye. The air on Mayfair, at least close to the small town of the same name, was almost standing still, appearing almost like a hot and humid curtain to those unfamiliar with the climate.
Harald Jefferson leaned his head back, sniffing for the vanishing traces of ozone in the air. It was always this still this time of the month, the quiet before the storms that Gluskap's passing entailed, the massive white and purple ball somewhat wreaking havoc on Mayfair's tidal system. Visitors, as uncommon as they were, often covered under the tables when the winds howled outside with almost 150 kilometres per hour, but Jefferson slept exceptionally well during those nights. Mayfair's biosphere had longs since adapted to the gas giant passing by twice every one and a half years, its plants having deep and solid roots.
The engineered crops the colonists planted also weathered those storms well enough, though they still had to import fertilizer every year. Mayfair was a small colony, the last census showing a population of just about 1,800 people, most of them farmers who had come here together with reverend Walther Xian, getting away from the Alliance to lead a self-determined life. They still sent a patrol frigate through the system every three months or so, but the people here never had had any problems with pirates or slavers of greedy corporations, and Harald Jefferson at elast was more than happy that they stayed away. The Alliance always meddled in people's lifes, always attracted trouble and opposition. Now, they most certainly had no need of the Alliance and all the baggage it entailed.
Especially in the light of the events on the Citadel and what happened after them Jefferson was more than happy to be on Mayfair, he thought, walking through a field of genengineered wheat, feeling the top of the plants with his palms. No, this here was a simple life, a peaceful life.
A gust of wind ripped him from his thoughts, the slap of warm air putting an irritated frown on his stoic, high-jawed ebony face. It was too early for the wind to fresh up! Now that could become a problem with the harvest if-
With a deafening roar a wave of pressurized air threw him off his feet, flattening the crops he had been thinking about. It was followed by the high-pitched whine of running engines and the low, vibrating hum of machinery as a stub-nosed, short-winged starship almost leisurely maneuvered only a few hundred feet above him towards the town. The whine intensified fast, until he had to shield his ears in fear of his eardrums bursting, then three blue bolts erupted from the vessel's bow, almost too fast to make out. An explosion, dwarfing all the noise the descending starship made by several magnitudes, rocked the ground, and a small mushroom cloud of dust and debris and fire erupted from the middle of the colony.
Town hall and the comm tower, Jefferson registered in a dazed calm. He should be panicked, he knew, should do something, but fear and surprise kept him pinned to the ground, watching the grey and red-painted ship slowly approach the neat settlement, like a confident predator walking towards a cornered prey, brandishing its fangs. The ship fired again, this time from its port side, a small thin stream of whitish blue sweeping across main street. This time the explosions were small and spread out, and he could hear the rumble that a mass of panicked people was bound to create. Detaching a host of smaller vehicles, the ship took up a position right above Mayfair's town greens.
Harald Jefferson scrambled to his feet, shaking off the daze, and darted off towards the town, to his house and family. Behind him, like appearing out of Gluskap's angry eye, another ship shot across the hoirzon towards the colony, trailing ionized air around it like a blazing ring. It was the same type as the one already hanging above the besieged town, and had Jefferson looked up he would have made out a large name painted on its hull in batarian script, alongside a multitude of apparently hand-written taunts in the same language.
Two hours later, silence reigned in the empty streets and houses of Mayfair, its open spaces littered with debris and corpses as both suns slowly set on the horizon.
It was one of twenty-three colonies in the Traverse and the Terminus Systems hit that day.
Amazonas Metroplex, Earth,
Systems Alliance, 2184 C.E.
The irritating whine of the overburdened air conditioning almost drowned the background chatter of the wall-covering television screen of the gloomy appartment. If you had served more than half of your conscious life aboard starships in an arid environment where temperatures always hovered between 18 and 20° Celsius, settling down again in the tropical heat and humidity of South America's Amazonas Basin was a major undertaking. Not that arl Amos Kenyon had tried very hard to adapt so far. His appartment was a mess, and that only if one was very generous. Take home food packages littered the floor and most other level spaces of the cubic box hardly fit to be called home, as did beer cans and dirty laundry. With the sun-blinds down twenty-four seven and the lights out he spent his waking ours in a murky twilight in front of the flickering screen. There were weekly power outages, times when the nets' just went blank for a few seconds, but he did not care much about that. After all, this was not the Sao Paolo Ritz, but rather just one step above the slums circling the metroplex in all directions.
With his meager pension could not afford more than that. Hell, he was lucky he had that meager pension after the discharge! Lieutenant-Commander Carl Amos Kenyon had been only a step away from receiving the command of a brand new frigate when his whole carreer had come tumbling down like a house of cards.
Four months ago the ship he had served on, the SSV Utah, had brought up a turian merc they had traced back to several pirate attacks on the fringes of Alliance space. Kenyon had been the leader of the boarding party when the destroyer had gone alongside the privateer. Knowing he would get blown to pieces in a stand-up fight, the turian had complied with their orders to shut down his drive and let them come aboard.
It had all been dreary routine until they had reached the cargo bay.
Amos Kenyon was no rookie. He had been in the navy since his eighteenths birthday twenty two years ago, and during his carreer he had brought up or witnessed the destruction of more ships than he could count on his fingers. Slavers, pirates, mercs – he had seen it all. Still, he had not been prepared for what awaited him in the twilight of the cargo holds of the Palas. Unnaturally thin faces. Empty eyes. Flies and maggots. The smell of urine and shit and death everywhere. A starving batarian infant crying, sucking at the rotting teet of his dead mother. Half dead people, no, shadows of people everywhere, herded into metal cages half as tall as himself, left to rot for days and days. And in the middle of it, a smug turian, waving a shipping manifesto proclaiming the legality of what he was doing under contract law.
The Westerlund News crew that had been aboard the Utah for publicity reasons had puked their guts out already by then and was busy filming again. Like vultures, he thought. He still had the clip on disc, the raw as well as the edited version. A souvenir, evidence from his military trial. The narration on it sounded almost excited as it talked about how he had executed the ship's captain and the crewmembers who had been with him in the cargo bay, a couple of batarians, in a fit of furious rage. Quite unlike the disgust and panic and shrill fear of the real thing. Quite unlike the nothing he had felt as he had done it. Nothing at all. Walking up to them, he had unholstered his sidearm and shot each of the three in the face at point blank range, then calmly handed over his gun to the nearest marine and ordered them all to call in all the Utah's medical staff to look after the 'cargo'.
He knew he was not above the law. That had never been the question. But he had been on the job long enough to know how nine in ten of such cases actually worked out. As foreign nationals were involved, lenient sentences were pronounced, ships confiscated – and two years later they would be back in business, quite often with a vengeance. No, he could not have let that happen again, not this time, even if it meant his carreer, his freedom.
But the turian captain had been a decorated military veteran, a man with connections. The whole case became political, if only behind the scenes. The Navy did its best to keep the news from spreading, exploiting loopholes in the contract it had signed with Westerlund News, effectively bullying them into silence. The turians also were quieted after threats surfaced to link one of their own with the conditions, conveniently available on film, on the Palas. But there was bad blood, and he was guilty anyway. In fact, he got off light for what he had done.
The compromise was a face-saver for all concerned, but it left him adrift. No other experience than soldiering, and a black mark on his vita. Nowhere to go. So he drowned in his own apathy.
A series of images showing starships flashed across the wide screen, and he instinctively focussed on them, but just for a second. It was an add for the Navy, showing obviously tinkered battle footage, proud men and women in uniform, music and a narrator's voice full of pathos. It was ridiculous. At least they had stopped using Shephard's face or it, going with some randomized image nowadays that most certainly originated from a VI programme factoring in the most likely demographic groups susceptible for the intended message. Propaganda for a glass-jawed tiger.
His gaze flickered over the garbage piling up in his room. Nobody visited him, and he hardly went outside anyway. There was no need to get rid of the trash. He had done that four months ago.
No, he had no family, and most the people he knew professionally were on duty somewhere in the galaxy, and even then, he was no officially a civilian. God, how he hated it. There were times when he wished there had been a firefight aboard the Palas and he had gone down then and there. He felt useless, a tool discarded off before its time. He had tried to drink those thoughts away, with little success. Lately, he found himself thinking more often about the gun in the top shelf of his drawer. A foolish thought, he knew, but a persistent one.
The appartment's comm console started beeping aggressively in an unintelligible melody that seemed to pierce his frontal lobes. Irritatedly, he grabbed an empty can of beer and threw it against it, silencing the damn thing. Leaning out of his filthy armchair he grabbed himself a fresh can of beer, shaking his head. He really needed to change the ring tone on the fuckin' comm terminal to something that did not come close to killing him. Placing the can against his lips, he took a couple of deep, long pulls. Arising the bother him anew, the comm console got him in the middle of it, almost making him choke on the luke-warm beer in his hands, sloshing beer and beer foam all over himself and the goddamn chair. With a half-full can of beer in one hand and nothing heavy enough in reach of his other hand he yielded up to his fate and walked over to the flashing piece of technology, groaning, and pushed the most prominent button on it.
There was a momentary delay before the actual connection was established that brought him to full attention. An encrypted call, for him? A serious face with high jawbones and well-trimmed whiskers appeared on screen, and Kenyon instinctively stood at attention. Fransciso 'Napoleon' Bautista's hawkish face seemed as it had been chiselled from Martian granite, not showing one ounce of emotion.
“How are you doing, son?” the captain of the SSV Utah and his former commanding officer asked cordially.
“I'm... rather busy, Sir,” Kenyon lied, tilting his head to the left while he unconsciously scratched his stubble. “Looking for a job, getting the rent payed,” he frowned as he saw the man on the other side just nodding, taking the lies in one stride. That was quite unlike his former commander. Not taking his eyes of Bautista's face he used his left hand to bring up a sub-menu on the console that allowed him the data tracer of the call. And all he got was heavily encrypted garble.
“With little luck, as I am told,” the uniformed man stated casually, causing Kenyon to avert his gaze.
“Ah, Sir, I am thankful for your call, but I really have a lot of things on my mind right now.”
Fransciso 'Napoleon' Bautista simply nodded again.
“I am sorry for what happened to you, son. But this here's no life for you, either. You need to get back into space. And I'm willing to get you there.”
That got him Amos' full attention.
“I'm listening,” he tried to keep his voice level.
“A high-risk mission, fishing in the dark. Small team, independent work, no back-up from the Alliance so there's plausible deniability,” the captain explained. “Specialists who get things done without caring for the rules or consequences,” he smiled. “We call them the Corsairs.”
Amos Kenyon thought of the gun in his drawer, then a thin smile crept on his face.
“I'm in, sir.”