A Lords of the Stars Short Story

Mattias von Schantz

February 24, 2186, Mercury, Solaris system

Outside the window, the sun shone with its endless rays. They reflected off the crystal facets of the rocks and danced over a pond of liquid lead a few hundred meters from the dome. The view was breathtaking, but Kham Men couldn't possibly enjoy it - not in this place, not on Mercury. Especially not after work. And that idiot jailer could drive anyone crazy.

He had worked himself to the point of unconsciousness inside the mining dome earlier in the day. The pungent smell of two hundred hairy Jerrassians had assaulted his nose. In the dim light, he had seen the prison guards wandering around the eaves, wearing gas masks and armed with hand gasers. The work had been inhumanly difficult for him in the oppressive heat, and two hours before the end of the day, he had passed out, collapsing in a shapeless heap on the floor.

 Of course, this was not permitted. This particular jailer, a Terran military man named Robert Wilson, had found him soon enough. Kham Men had awoken to the Terran's shrill cries and the pungent smell of burning flesh, which he soon identified as his own. The anger he felt had been almost uncontrollable, but retaliating against a jailer was tantamount to committing suicide; the life of a prisoner on Caloris Base was not worth much.

 He didn't do much the following night. Dreams, or perhaps nightmares, swept over him in waves of recurrence. Sure, the wound in his arm had been sterilized by the burning heat of the gaser, but it ached despite the painkillers he had illicitly obtained from a countryman in a neighboring barrack. In the nightmares, he dreamed of times lost…

...Across the blue sky, small white wooly clouds slowly drifted by. He had heard that the Terran vision perceived them as orange, but to him they were white and would have been a good omen for fishing, had he not been a captive. Around him, about thirty other Jerrassians milled about, all of whom were prisoners. The only free people here at the Reagan Base were the Sunguard soldiers, who guarded the captives as if they were animals. In front of them stood a Terran transport ship with its cargo ramp lowered, and a river of Jerrassians was being forcefully herded towards it. He caught one last glimpse of the verdant meadows and fields around him before the gate closed with a soft hiss. The Terrans were harsh and inhuman, but he couldn't help but admire their technology.

 A few shouts of command blared through the speaker system in the Terran language of English. He didn't understand the words, but assumed they meant the ship had lifted off. Locked in a dark room with thirty other prisoners, he completely lost track of time. It could have been a week or a month before the ship landed once more. Only once during the journey did he feel the proof of the Terrans’ superior technology: a wave of nausea, a sign of the altered gravitational conditions brought on by the jump through hyperspace. Outside, Solaris I - Mercury to the Terrans - hung in space. A sharp sense of fear, almost painful in nature, swept down Kham Men's spine and made the aggression center of his brain tingle as the shock of adrenaline hit…

...He opened his eyes and stubbornly brushed away the imaginary domains of the dream. A scream startled him awake, only to realize it was his own. The wound had dried overnight and stuck to the fabric of his bed, tearing free as he moved. He had certainly woken up on the wrong side today, with no hope that the day would improve. Full of bitterness, he got up and washed as best he could with the meager amount of water he had at his disposal. When the lunch bell rang, he pawed through the gray, damp-smelling cement corridors. The dining room door creaked as Men pushed it closed. Inside, two hundred other prisoners were trying to stomach the animal food the prison cook struggled to serve them. As he calmly and methodically chewed the dry flakes, a plan started to form in his head. Thoughts, forbidden thoughts, gathered in the winding paths of neurons and coalesced into an idea of a rare kind.

When the cracked plate was emptied, he stepped out of the dining room with determined strides. The work bell rang, and two hundred prisoners marched loyally through the outer corridors to the mining domes. Kham Men did not leave. The prisoners were counted and found to be too few; the work clock rang again to give him one last chance. He started to walk, but in the opposite direction. Only then did he emotionally realize that he was on the run. The idea had earlier seemed so good, so simple and cold; now fear was starting to rip at his spine. The same fear that had plagued him day and night for years. Now he stood there, face to face with it, about to finally defeat it. Defeat it! The thought filled his fogged mind with a fleeting joy. The enemy was the Terran Federation’s military force, the Sunguard. Three million men stationed across seven star systems and none - no one - would be able to catch him. Then the thoughts of a bygone time returned...

...He had first come into contact with the revolution when one of his best friends, Namir All, turned out to be one of the leading figures in the Jerrassian Liberation Front. 

"What did we really get from the Terrans?" All had asked him in that innocent way of his. Kham Men, in his usual nonchalant manner, had muttered something about technology, peace, and prosperity.

"Technology, you say?" All retorted. "For twenty years, half of your life, the Terrans have sat here and ruled over us. If we had been left to fend for ourselves, we would surely have invented everything the Terrans have - and much more. Now, instead, they have prevented us from evolving, and only given us little bits of their own technology, bits they consider harmless for us to play with."

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Sure, Man thought, there must be something to what he said, but no one could really know what the world would have looked like if the Terrans hadn't arrived.

"The Terrans have only told us lies. We had a fully functioning state before they came here. Now it's all rotten," All continued.

"We have retained the type of government we’ve always had, here in the free world."

"On the surface, yes! You just don't know how much the Terrans control around here. They use our leaders as puppets in a game that is all about manipulating us. Just because the Terrans have advanced technologically, they don't have some kind of universal right to rule over other people."

"Without the Terrans, we might have annihilated ourselves in a nuclear war. When we were younger, before they came, there was always talk of a second world war, which would mean the end of us all. With the arrival of the Terrans, all such fears ended. I guess we should be satisfied with the help we received from them."

"Well, it's true. The Terrans may have saved us from nuclear war, but instead of dying quickly in a radioactive storm, we're slowly dying under the yoke of the Terrans. They've enslaved every race they've come across! When they first reached the stars, they ended up in a tripartite war. They allied themselves with one party and took complete control of it. The other party was occupied with the excuse that it had to be controlled. By the time they reached us, they were already a strong force. Three civilizations fused together to form the Terran Federation. They didn't need any more members. They just enslaved us for their own gain. The Terrans exploit us. It's time for the Jerrassian people to stand on their own two feet!"

His mouth argued against All's views, but his heart sided with them. From that day on, the Sunguard had gained a devoted adversary in Kham Men…

...The corridors through which he now ran were completely unknown to him. The texts on the signs were only in the Terran language, but the icons on them helped him move forward. There was probably a lot of activity going on inside the prison ward, but no one imagined an escaped prisoner would make it here, to the corridor leading to the hangars. The automatic doors opened for him as he approached his final destination. Perhaps the Terrans would be able to check with the doors' computers if he had passed through, but he didn't think they would.

When the last door swung open, he had to stop. He caught his breath when he saw the room where the ships were lined up. At the far end of the dome, a large cruiser was parked; some of its side panels had opened up and it was apparently under repair. No one was there. Closer to him were two transport barges: one half-loaded, the other empty. To the side of the three ships there were some buses parked, but he didn't pay them any attention. 

The thoughts began to take shape in his head once again. All three ships were obviously powered by field generators. The barges would probably have been easier to get into, but the very idea of using a Sunguard cruiser held so much excitement that he finally decided on that one. With quick steps he ran towards the ship. Half a kilometer of steel stretched out before him, and with a sigh of disappointment, he suddenly realized that he would never know where he should enter it.

The sound he heard from the other side of the ship made him change his mind. The cruiser might be long, but it was not wide. In half a minute he had walked below it. In front of him stood a man in military uniform, inspecting a pair of boxes, that were apparently to be fitted into the ship. Men cleared his throat. The sound was all it took for the Terran, who was obviously unarmed, to turn around. With astonishment, Kham Man realized it was Robert Wilson. Now he would face not only the Terran supremacy embodied in the Sunguard but also the Sunguard personified in Wilson. 

The Terran was obviously more surprised than Men was. Then, an unmistakable expression of fear rose on the already pale man's face. Kham Man grinned. Wilson took a step back and tripped over a box he had carelessly placed on the floor a few minutes earlier.

"Take me into the ship!" Men hissed through hard lips. Wilson shook his head, but then began to move. He knew all too well how Jerrassians reacted when they became aggressive. It was for this reason that the elite units of the Sunguard regular forces consisted almost exclusively of Jerrassians. 

If the ship was big on the outside, it was enormous on the inside. Kham Man couldn't understand how anyone could possibly find their way around its winding corridors, but he suspected the Terrans had had that information written into their brains by their computers. Everything was unlocked. A ship under repair could not be hijacked, of course. Well, that’s what the Terrans thought, anyway. He would prove them wrong. The last thick lead door to the field generator room opened with a heavy sigh. 

Wilson was standing right behind him. The white Terran irritated him, and to avoid having to listen to his frightened breath, Kham Men struck him. Wilson collapsed, either dead or unconscious. 

In two minutes, it would all be over. As he began to converse with the computer, he could not shake the past. Once again, he was brought back to his youth…

...He had only been fifteen when the Terrans first came to Jerr. It had been ten o'clock in the morning when suddenly all radio transmissions were overtaken by a much stronger transmission across all frequencies. A calm, bright voice had promised peace and prosperity to all. The entire planet had been shocked. Just five years earlier, the Great Patriotic War had ended, with the capitalist southern power defeated. People thought everything would be well with the world. Then the Terrans arrived, and everything changed.

No one had any advance warning that it was going to happen. Suddenly, one day, the Terran ship had just been there, in low orbit around Jerr, clearly visible to anyone, even during the day, as it passed around the planet in its transpolar orbit.

Many were frightened. Against a technology capable of traveling between the stars at will, Jerr wouldn't have much to defend itself with. The People's Council decided to cooperate with the Terrans. Things appeared to be working out fine, but beneath the surface, rot was beginning. The People's Council ruled as the Terrans wanted, and the entire civilization began to decay. In hindsight, he regretted not doing even more to counter the Terrans; now, it was too late. He would never know how it all ended…

...When the computer was fully programmed, he realized that he was shaking like a leaf. He was going to try something no human - Terran or Jerrassian - had ever done before. In the bubble of non-time that the field generator would create, he would be trapped forever. Nothing would ever change, not even the smallest hair on his body would curl. Even his thoughts would cease moving, and he would sense nothing, not until the universe eventually collapsed and both time and non-time disappeared. Stasis. A curt nod from Kham Men was enough for the computer to activate the stasis field, and he slipped into his escape - into eternity…