COMMANDER

When I came to, it was with a snap, like waking up from light sleep to a sound which shouldn’t be there. I was in the AV on an accel couch across from the girl who had saved me from the Hanosian ministry, and didn’t feel too bad, actually. The trauma bot stood nearby, unmoving, and I could hear amphibians croaking through the open airlock. Voices were speaking quietly in the pilot compartment, and others outside.

Spear was sitting near, looking at me. Her thigh was wrapped in compression bandages but she looked okay sitting there in her skivvies.

“Heya,” I said.

“Hey, yourself, sir,” she replied, a look of concern on her face now. “How do you feel?”

“Not bad,” I said. “How about you?”

“I owe you my life, sir, in more ways than one. I wanted to be here when you woke up to say thank you, proper, before the others crowded in.”

It took me a little by surprise. I didn’t want to hide behind the bullshit of “just doing my job, trooper” or some other trite response. Regardless of how true they might be, such responses robbed experiences like this of the emotion that should be acknowledged. On the other hand, I really didn’t want her to get all weepy on me, either.

“You’re welcome, Spear. What happened to that scaly bastard, anyway? Did it get away?”

She laughed, and said, “No, sir. We’re eating it.”

“Hah! Is it any good?”

“No! But we’re eating the sonofabitch anyway! I’ll call the others, sir.”

In a few moments, Stitch and Ronin stood close by while nearly all of the rest of the team crowded around behind them, smiles everywhere. What the hell?

“How are you feeling, Commander?” asked Stitch.

“Pretty good, all things considered,” I responded. “How long was I out?”

“Two days,” answered Ronin.

“What?” I exploded.

I decided then I wouldn’t explode again anytime soon. Another good, timely decision, as the pain I was surprised was not there when I woke up suddenly put in a guest appearance. I hadn’t moved till then other than to twist my head a little. The blanket covering hadn’t shifted at all until I yelled. When it moved, I saw bandages wrapping my torso. I decided to not move much more, either. Maybe later.

Stitch answered my yell. “You were fucked up righteous, sir. The croc, we’re calling it a crocodile as it is the closest Earth equivalent, anyway, the croc got you good. It tore open your left thigh just above the knee and opened the femoral artery. Another claw on your back tore the two lowest ribs on your right side loose from your spine and caused damage to your lower lung, liver, and kidney. Somewhere in the battle, the right side of your face got smashed again. We put your ear back in place and set the bones in the cheek, temporal and occipital, but the transceiver was destroyed as was the neural connector.”

Ronin spoke then, “Stitch and the bot linked with the ship and the doctor to treat you. You were in surgery nearly five hours. We almost lost you, Wolf.”

“Yeah,” Stitch said while nodding, “you coded twice and half the team gave blood for transfusing you. We felt it was better to use real blood than deplete our stock of synthetic.”

“What about the nanos?” I asked. “Any issues with transferring nanos?”

“Naw,” Stitch responded, “they are destroyed in the transfusion process and yours are given a tickle to replicate to standard concentrations within the new, cleaned blood supply.”

I nodded, a sickly taste of something nasty in my mouth. “Fucking croc!”

After hearing this, I knew I was in no shape to jump up and take over.

“You have command until I am back on my feet, Ronin.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Senior Sergeant Donner assumes full command of Team Zulu at the order of injured Commander Rawlings.”

“Any of the rest of our cupcakes injured?” I asked.

A round of laughter burst out.

“No!” yelled Dog. “But the croc won’t be bothering anybody anymore! Tastes decent with enough salt on it.”

At the same time I heard Boomer whisper to someone, “I told you he was too fucking tough to go outside.” She probably thought I wouldn’t hear her.

“Are you kidding?” Buzz whispered back. “The Devil probably sent him back out of fear.”

I took a deep breath and sighed. That hurt, too.

“Awright, troopers, take your shit out to the latrine where it belongs,” Ronin instructed with a deep chuckle.

Stitch was fussing with the controls on the bot.

“Latrine?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Ronin. “Spear dug it and set it up herself, bum leg and all. Wouldn’t let anyone help her. She said it was the last order you gave her and she’d just be damned if she wasn’t going to carry it out.”

“Huh? What do you know about that?” I said. Suddenly I was feeling quite dreamy, snug and warm and all kinds of good. “What did you do to me, Stitch?”

“Just a little suppression field, sir, and some feel-good juice. We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”

I wanted to say something else . . . I think . . . maybe I did . . . maybe . . . not too . . .

When I woke up it was dark in the AV with only a few lights glowing softly. I shifted experimentally. Not too bad. I gritted my teeth and sat up a little, leaning on my elbows. The blanket covering me shifted and I pulled it off onto the deck. There were still tubes attached at my right thigh, and the left was covered in thick bandages. My torso was wrapped up tight, as well. I could feel the tape on my face now, where it wrapped around from the bandages on the right side of my head. Everything hurt but it was bearable.

“Do you people always go around naked?” asked a small voice from across the AV.

It was the young girl who had saved me at the ministry.

“Ah, well, um, nudity doesn’t bother us at all, if that’s what you mean,” I answered. “If it bothers you, though, I’ll cover up.”

“It’s okay,” she responded. “I’m not used to it but, well, I guess I better get used to it. You’re the leader, Rawlings, right?”

I nodded. “Yes. Commander JD Rawlings. What is your name?”

“Tamaria Bonel. I am with the Revolutionary Citizen’s Front. We are the ones who oppose any collusion with the LCP.”

“Well, Tamaria, it is very nice to meet you. Thank you for saving me from those government types. That was a very unpleasant experience.”

“Are you really from ancient Earth?”

“Actually, I was born on Mars but I have been to Earth many times. Much of my life, though, has been in deep space with the Fleet, the military, traveling to various colonies throughout the galaxy.”

“Wow!” she breathed in admiration. “This is so excellent!”

A little louder, I said, “AV, interior lights up twenty percent.”

The shadows lessened and I could see her, now, sitting upright on the accel couch and holding her blanket up with one hand to cover herself.

“Um, you should know, Tamaria, we have all seen you nude for most of the day or two I am aware of. We undressed you to allow the medical robot to examine and treat you.”

“I figured that out,” she said. “I remember getting hit by something in my right side. It knocked the breath from me and I fell down. I remember you picking me up but it didn’t hurt at all right then. That’s all I remember.”

“You went into shock almost instantly because of the severity of your wound. You were shot by one of the Hanos government security guards with a projectile weapon. The projectile did quite a bit of damage to your insides. I can have our medic explain it with more detail, later.”

“Am I . . . am I going to be okay?” She sounded very afraid.

“Yes, absolutely. The surgery to fix you up was successful, and we’ve just been waiting for you to wake up as your body recovered.”

I decided to not tell her about the nanobots I had authorized to be put into her to help with healing. Despite the fact they carried programming to self-destruct within days, the idea of tiny little robots coursing around inside her might unduly frighten her. Stem cell therapy had been performed on her damaged organs, and she would be exactly the same after her ordeal as she had been before, except for the scars, of course.

“I’m going to call in some of the others, now, if it’s alright with you,” I said.

She nodded and pulled the blanket a little closer.

“Trauma Bot,” I said in command voice. “Notify Trooper Gold and Sergeant Donner their patients are awake, please.”

A moment passed. “Done, Commander,” the bot said. “Stitch and Ronin are on the way.”

Mondo! They had the bots using call signs! The two troopers entered.

“Good to see you awake, sir,” stated Stitch.

“This is Tamaria Bonel,” I told them. “Tamaria, this is Trooper Gold. We call him Stitch because he is a field medic. And this is Sergeant Donner. We call her Ronin.”

“Oh, I get it. Like call signs on the radio,” Tamaria said.

“Right!” I congratulated her. “Ronin is my second in command.”

To Stitch, I said, “Get me unhooked from this stuff, will you? I need to hit the latrine.”

To Ronin, I said, “Would you sit with Tamaria for a moment? She may have some questions.”

Stitch called Dog to help and together they got me where I needed to go. My trip and duty were unpleasant and painful as hell, but better than the alternative.

The next morning we held a briefing after rounding up clothing for Tamaria and me. Tamaria explained to us how she was involved.

“The Revolutionary Citizen’s Front is a planet-wide group of people who don’t believe Hanos should be dealing with the LCP in any way. A few years ago, we came upon evidence someone in the government was accepting advanced technology from them and we are concerned the ministry will use the technology to deepen their hold on the people, to control us completely and change the government to more of a dictatorship or empire. Since then, we have been recruiting others who believe as we do and began to infiltrate the government at many levels to try to learn more and gather evidence against them. I went to work as a secretary for Deputy Minister Grone Nefal.

“Grone is one of us, with the RCF. I’m not supposed to know it but I do. We try to keep as much as possible on the ‘need to know’ basis in case one of us gets caught. You cannot tell what you do not know. Anyway, last year we did gain some evidence of advanced tech in the hands of some of the ministers, particularly the prime minister. We have not gone public with the evidence yet as we are not prepared to take the necessary steps following such a revelation.”

“You mean, like a coup, taking over the government?” I asked.

“Yes. We have no real idea of how much dealings with the LCP have actually gone on, or what kind of technology has been provided. We have been very, very careful . . . maybe too careful . . . I don’t know. Anyway, our leaders are convinced there is enough high tech involved for the ministry to take over the planet any time they want. We don’t yet know why they have not, or what they might be waiting for.

”But, at least we knew about PM Bando’s plan to capture and detain you and your team. The first step was to lure you to the planet and make pleasant overtures, then later detain you forcibly if necessary. I was passed the information and the advanced tech to intervene if necessary, and if I could.”

“Do you have any knowledge of the LCP?” Ronin asked. “Can you tell us of the history of your world or the history we have missed out on for the last eight centuries?”

“Some,” Tamaria answered. “I can tell what they taught us in school and what I have learned since I went to work at the ministry. But first, can I ask some questions, too?”

“Of course,” Ronin answered.

“How old are you?” Tamaria asked Ronin.

Ronin looked surprised. “Um, I am twenty-seven, Tamaria,” she replied.

“Call me Tam, please. I am twenty. I cannot imagine being twenty years old and knowing all of my family and friends died eight hundred years ago.”

“I am thirty-two,” I told Tam, “and it’s pretty hard for us to accept, as well. However, we are hoping to figure out a way to reverse all of this and get back to where we belong.”

“How could you do that?” Tam queried.

“Well, we’re not sure it even can be done. We do know there are other dimensions, and when we Transition-shift from one point in space/time to another point, we travel vast, unimaginable distances in fractions of a second.”

She looked very confused.

I grinned at her. “Don’t worry, it’s confusing to me, too. Our scientists tell us space/time is not round or cubicle or rectangular or anything like that. Imagine a sheet of paper lying flat on a desk, and imagine the piece of paper represents our universe and space/time. Your planet is a dot at one end of the paper and Earth is a dot at the other end. Now imagine the distance between them is so huge that to travel between them would take a hundreds or thousands of years even if you could travel at the speed of light.”

She nodded at me.

“Okay, now, imagine picking up the piece of paper and folding it over several times sort of like . . . Um, do you know what an accordion is?”

“Yes, it’s like this . . .” She pointed her finger in the air and moved it up and down several times, and sideways at the same time.

“Yes, that’s it. Okay, with the paper folded several times like an accordion, look where the dots of Hanos and Earth are. If you take the shortest route, right through the paper, then they are nearly right next to each other, right?”

“So you mean space/time is folded, like the paper?”

“That’s the theory, yes. We prove it each time we Transition-jump. We cross the barriers between dimensions, popping out of one side and popping into the other side. So, the theory about time is, if we can do this with distance, why not with time, also? We just have to figure out how.”

“Oh, I see. But, if you did, when would you pop out? What would you do?”

“Those are both excellent questions, Tam. We have been asking ourselves those same questions and we don’t have the answers, yet. It might help if we understood a little more about history and the LCP.”

“Oh, right!”

Tamaria began her tale.

After the disaster of the peace conference, the Shaquaree had charged the Earth humans as being the duplicitous agents, betraying the sacred trust of the truce. They portrayed themselves as the unjustly attacked but victorious race. With no surviving humans from the event around, there was no one available to argue the point.

There were at least five different races in the League of Confederated Planets. The Shaquaree were one of the lesser races, and acted as the security force for the LCP, a mercenary army. They conquered planets and took whole populations as slaves for the other races of the LCP, according to reports from prior to the peace conference. But, nothing since that time—no reports of any kind concerning any race of the LCP other than what Hanos had learned from direct contact. Rumors gathered from early trader ship visits said humans weren’t the only race to be plundered as slaves. No one knew where the home planets of the other races were, or what kind of advanced technologies they had.

The Shaquaree were apparently immune to emotions and operated much like a hive society with several castes. The lower castes did not question orders from a higher caste. Like insects, they simply did as they were programmed by genetics to do, serve and obey.

The only other race of the LCP anything was known about was the Torbor, bi-pedal and birdlike with feathers. The Torbor had wings and were able to fly until puberty, when the wing functions began to atrophy as walking became the norm due to weight increase. They were a race of travelers and traders, and had achieved space travel many centuries before humans. They were exceptionally intelligent and had very advanced technologies.

The proof the RCF had obtained clearly indicated elements within the ministry were dealing with both the Shaquaree and the Torbor.

Of humanity, of the descendants of Earth and Earth colonies, there was little known. The Shaquaree had clamped down on interstellar travel shortly after the peace conference. If there was still a Fleet, or where it may be, was not known. There had been no contact with any other humans for over seven hundred years.

Hanos had once been a new and thriving colony with much promise. A spaceport had existed on one continent, not far from where the capital city was now located. Settlements had been sown and were growing. Trade with the interstellar ships had brought new technology and news, and had taken away much in minerals and other trade goods.

Then, the ships stopped coming. There were no reasons, no explanations, they just stopped. Left to their own devices with no external aid, the settlements on Hanos began to degrade. They began to fight, politically, for leadership or for independence. Soon enough, wars broke out. Initially fought mainly with swords and spears, the competition to better their enemies began arms races which led, over many years, to cannons and bombs and automatic firearms, to spies and infiltration and treachery. In the end, a great planet-wide war was fought between three factions.

Only one faction survived in enough numbers to start over. Damage to the lands and waterways had been catastrophic, taking many years, even generations, to recover. Hanosians realized what they had done to themselves and their home, and a new religion was born which revered nature and peaceful harmony. Progress was made and Hanosian society began to flourish again.

Not too long after this time of progress began, the Torbor first showed up. They were apparently peaceful traders, welcomed as visitors and trade relations were struck. Over four hundred years of mostly peaceful trade, certain practices had become the norm, accepted by the Torbor and Hanosians alike. Hanos produced a certain crop of fruit which, when harvested just before maturity, could be fermented into a brandy-like drink of particular delight to the Torbor. The other practice had the ultra-rich among the Torbor travel to Hanos to hunt on certain preserves set aside for this practice. These preserves contained well-kept populations of both mammal and dinosaur species which were particularly violent and dangerous to hunt.

It was these preserves and the hunting expeditions, and the fruit liqueur, which kept the Hanosians safe. So long as those two items were available, the Torbor protected Hanos from the ravages of the Shaquaree.

On the negative side of the relationship, the aliens forced Hanos to a technological stagnation. Hanos was not allowed to develop any new technology. Mining of any mineral or petroleum-related products were strictly controlled in methods and volumes to enforce the stagnation.

This revelation explained why the Shaquaree ship we had seen had been scanning and geo-mapping the planet. They had been ensuring the mining production levels were below the maximum allowed!

The Shaquaree had shown up three hundred years ago. They did not plunder the planet only because the Torbor held them at bay, protecting their liqueur and hunting preserves. So, the Shaquaree would come every year to perform a total survey of the planet, searching for any mining activity or other signs of Hanos trying to improve their own technologies, or if the hated humans of the Earth Fleet ship Rontar had appeared.

“They knew we were coming here?” Ronin blurted.

“Oh, yes. We have been taught for over three hundred years to watch for your arrival and to report to the Shaquaree the instant it occurred. They left a device with the ministry to be activated upon your arrival. They were counting on the Earthlings making contact with Hanos because we were once an Earth colony.”

I looked hard at Ronin. “Contact the captain immediately and warn them.”

She nodded to me and then a distracted look came over her face as she communicated by transceiver.

“What about the other new technology, Tam? Like what they used to incapacitate me?” I asked.

“There are several items,” she responded. “We think the prime minister requested technology which would help him with being able to control crowds and possible protests or riots but in a non-lethal manner. The paralyzing device can completely incapacitate the victims without killing them. Usually the effects are felt much longer by the victims. But you seemed to recover extremely quickly. Anyway, the device works with an emission of some kind and can be tuned for more effect or less effect, and for broad coverage for crowds or narrow focus on individuals. It has to be pointed, like a gun.”

“But, you, the RCF, have a device to overcome the paralyzer, or negate it?”

“We stole one of their devices. They have both because they feared we might steal one of the incapacitators and wanted to be able to negate any use by us against them. It was hidden away until the RCF found out you were to be detained. We thought they might use their device on you so I was provided the counter-device and instructed to use it if necessary to get you away safely.”

“You were prepared to be a sacrifice if it all went sideways?”

She looked at me intently. “Would you not sacrifice your life for your family, your planet?”

I nodded. “That is my job, every day. I understand your position, and now I understand your commitment.”

Ronin started suddenly, her whole body jerking and her eyes flying open wide.

“Aw, shit! They’re here!” she cried out.