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Aetiee #1
Date: 17 June 2008, 8:47 am
Thanks for reading. I'm also working on my own novel right now called WAYLAND PRIORY in case you dig my sci-fi writing. Please check out a couple excerpts and character sketches of it I have up on my blog at http://marmarfunny.blogspot.com , and let me know what you think if you have the time!!! Thank you so much and let me know how you like this series in the comments. :-)
Aetiee
by Marty Duffy
1.
When I settled the horses into the barn, I swung the large doors shut, and ran home as fast as I could. The sun was setting into the rocky escarpment called Aetiee that towered over our farm. I bounded over the three wooden steps leading up to the patio, and threw open the screen door on my way inside. Grandfather watched me from one of the windows. An envious smile overcame his typically stoic face.
Following habit, but also aware of the importance of good manners, I slipped off my muddy shoes (without untying them) and put them on the bottom row of the rack by the door. And then I went to find grandfather.
He wasn't in the living room where I saw him looking out, but he had retired to his little study under the stair well. It was a cramped, dusty old place, but he liked it just fine. It made him feel secure, he'd say, and made him feel tied down to the planet.
"I took care of the horses, grandpa, will you tell me your stories now?"
Our relationship was as sweet and serene as any between a boy and his grandfather: hard work, delicious lunches, late-night stories, and (of course) overwhelming love.
He said, "Well alright then." But then a troubled look erased his little smile. It was extremely out-of-character. I asked him what was wrong, but he just shook his head.
He took off his glasses as though he had some terrible news, and his eyes watered up a bit.
He said, "Jimmy, my boy, I've thought about this for awhile now. I think you're old enough and…" he searched for a word, and then said, "and bright enough to listen to the most important stories I have to tell you."
"What do you mean grandfather?" I asked.
"It's nothing for you to be frightened about, my boy, nothing like that. It's just that it becomes rather… rather hard for me to talk about certain things. But I want you to know these things, and it is very important that you listen and remember carefully."
"I always listen to you, grandpa."
Grandfather smiled a little bit once more.
"Yes. Yes, I know."
And then he leaned over his desk and tapped the AstroAtlas that built into his blotter. It came out of sleep-mode, and the Orion Arm of the Milky Way slivered across his desk. Crimson sparkles on the arm (which represented the fifty or so New Inner Colonies) materialized onto the blotter while subdued grey circles highlighted the lost worlds of the war. Grandfather pointed at the outermost of the crimson sparkles.
"This is our star Jimmy. We just call it the sun, but the people on Earth call it—"
"Vega, grandfather."
"Yes, that's right. That's very good." Grandfather's voice choked a little bit when he said, "There were once cities as big as any on Earth itself when I was your age, you know. There were thousands of people in this very valley of ours, in fact."
"I know grandpa," I said, also sad. "They told us in school."
"Did they, now?"
"They told us all about Aetiee; they told us about those squids and prophets. They killed all of those others there, too," I said while I pointed at the grey circles on the AstroAtlas.
Grandfather said, "They shouldn't scare you like that in school."
"It's not scary grandpa! I've even seen the bones myself when daddy takes me plowing the fields; the machines drag 'em up sometimes. And guns, and helmets, and all sorts of stuff."
And then grandfather closed his eyes and shook his head. It was the first time I had ever seen him look genuinely disappointed in me.
When he opened his eyes, he said, "Jimmy, my boy, I fought on Aetiee. I was there."
I froze.
"I fought the Covenant across both continents, in space with the Marines, and even on Earth."
"You were in the war, grandpa?"
"Yes."
"What?! Why didn't you tell—"
"I'm telling you now, aren't I?"
I closed my mouth, and prepared to listen. Grandpa rustled through a box behind his desk and pulled out a card with scribbles and printed letters all over it.
"This was my draft card. Drafting is when the government forced us to join the military."
"Why would they need to force anyone to stop the Covenant, grandpa?"
"Times were different, my boy. No one really wanted anything to do with the war. We knew it was going on, but we thought we were winning! But when the refugees starting coming from closer places like Jericho… Well… People caught on."
"So then they joined?"
"No. They rebelled."
"What?"
"You will never hear about this in school Jimmy, but we hated the UN just as much as we hated the Covenant."
I hated grandfather at that moment. I wanted him to come to school with me – to see the truth about the war. I wanted him to see how humanity rallied to the cause and defeated an overwhelming force (and on the home world, no less).
Grandfather sensed my alarm, and turned off the AstroAtlas.
He said, "Jimmy, let's drive up to the escarpment, and I'll show it to your own eyes."
I nodded, and stood up to leave the study. When my grandpa put his draft card away, I saw other mementos in his box: there was a silver star, uniform ribbons, photographs of starships and soldiers, and dog tags.
The car was parked next to the barn, and I got in and strapped my belt. I was looking out my window when I heard the horses neigh. The engine started, and I turned to my grandpa.
I told him, "How come we've never gone to Aetiee before, grandpa?"
He said, "We're not supposed to."
"Why?" I asked as he pulled out of the driveway.
"There's no need to disturb the poor souls up there unless it's for the good of their memories."
"What are you going to show me, grandpa?"
"Their memories."
I remained quiet as the car drove on the straight road across the valley towards Aetiee.
When the road steepened, though, I said, "I'm scared grandpa."
Grandpa smiled, and said, "Me too, my boy, me too."
Aetiee #2
Date: 26 June 2008, 3:45 pm
Aetiee
By Marty Duffy
2.
At the top of the rocky escarpment called Aeitee, grandfather parked at a public lot overlooking the valley. We got out and took the place in. The sun setting behind us cast its warm, light blue rays against the backs of our necks and mixed with the atmosphere to render a stunning purplish hue all along the horizon. The white water clouds and the yellow sulfur clouds mixed together like running oil paints on a palette.
I thought it was glorious, but the yellow clouds and the purplish sky made grandfather cringe.
He always stayed indoors during the evening. For him and most other people who had lived through the war, purple was the color of terror. The yellow clouds, though, were scars unique to our planet. Our southern continent, Orpo, was a lifeless hellhole dotted by poison seas of sulfuric acid. The yellow clouds in the sky were condensed vapor from those seas. Plasma, nuclear weapons, nerve gases, and a long list of other horrors claimed hundreds of millions of Orpans during the war. Those poison seas, though, came from the finale of it all: the glassing of the continent's abundant surface pools of oil and tar by Covenant orbitals. Orpo's entire hemisphere was condemned.
Geneseo -- Vega Noir's northern continent -- survived. We owed our survival to the folks who died on Aetiee.
"Let's look at the sign, grandpa."
Grandfather and I walked to an information kiosk just in front of the escarpment's edge. The sign read:
JOHN BOYD AETIEE CONTINENTAL PARK.
Who was John Boyd Aetiee?
In 2386, Slipstream explorer and colonization
speculator John Boyd Aetiee jumped away from Reach (which
was then just a small naval outpost) on a mission to map
planetary systems in Earth's constellation Lyra. At the
time of the expedition, Alpha Lyra (Vega) had been
rejected as a system with habitable planets by astronomers
in the United Nations Space Command. Aetiee, however, was
a rash explorer, and his unlikely discovery of Vega Noir
proved to be a great embarrassment to the young UNSC's
analysts on Earth. It was an embarrassment which would be
fondly remembered and celebrated as a matter of pride
among future generations of defiant slipspace explorers
who settled outer colony worlds and who established
anti-UN insurrections throughout colonized space.
The sign, it appeared, was from before the war.
"I wouldn't be surprised if this thing's the only record of Mr. Aetiee left in the whole galaxy," grandfather said, a bit miffed.
He was alluding to the destruction of the Colonial Chatternet. The collective knowledge of humanity for over 500 years had mostly been erased along with everything else in the colonies. Even the so-called "informational doomsday vault" under Reach's Highland Mountains had been wiped out. We wouldn't have even known how to install light bulbs anymore if it weren't for the UNSC artificial intelligence constructs that had survived the war. The UNSC deployed them as planetary "informational governors" to hold exiled planetary governments' hands as they returned to their burnt worlds. They distributed information in the same way as the chatternet had, but only on local planetary networks with extremely limited and heavily monitored connectivity with other colonies. There was a strong desire among some of the older generations to rebuild the inter-planetary net, but the UNSC insisted on modeling the re-colonization "array" vis-à-vis the mandates of the Cole Protocol. That is to say, they sought to compartmentalize communications to the greatest degree possible -- for the sake of security.
We walked along the fenced edge of the escarpment and through a camping area towards a forest. The trees were obviously genetically altered, fast-growing things. You could always tell. No matter how hard they tried to make them look like a part of a natural forest, something always managed to look too orderly and planned about them. The trees weren't evenly spaced, but they looked just similar enough to draw attention to their predetermined layout.
A wide, dirt nature trail ran through the forest. It appeared to hug along the horseshoe-shaped escarpment. I looked at grandfather to see if he was up for the hike. He looked at the setting sun.
"I suppose we have a few hours before it gets dark…"
Vega Noir was a slow rotator; it had seven hours of morning and evening each.
I nodded and said, with a shrug, "It's too bad we didn't bring Tory and Little Boots."
"Horses wouldn't do too well up here, my boy," grandfather replied.
"Why not?"
He appeared to reflect on a sour memory. "They go mad when they smell the squids – even ones that've been dead and buried for decades."
I took the lead when we finally decided to walk the trail. With each step down it, though, grandfather's breathing got heavier.
"Grandpa?"
Glancing around, he chuckled to himself. "The off-worlders just called the place 'eighty' when I was here. They couldn't get the accent right.
"My first unit was all local vanguard, but I transferred out to a corps that was from some of the bigger inner colonies. Troy, Eros, Corsini… Places like those. I didn't have a problem with other folks from home, but… It was the Orpans: they were out of their damned minds! You didn't want to be in the same fox hole as guy whose friends, family, house, town, city, and whole God damn half of the world was wiped out."
The wind picked up a bit. The trail was a sort of mini-wind tunnel, and the air whistled the branches. The terrain got more and more rugged as we went along. It tipped at steep angles and it had a lot of outcroppings to skirt.
"I can't believe how beautiful it is," grandfather said under his breath as though he was grudgingly admitting it.
We walked silently along the trail for a good half an hour before I finally asked, "What was it like back then, grandpa?"
He said, "When I came up here at your age – before the war – it was a flat plain; there was no forest, or any of this rough ground." He paused and then, with a hint of terror in his voice, he added "All these little dips we're going up and down are—they're from the mortar tanks. From the Covenant."
I said, "But grandpa, these aren't craters."
He stopped and shuffled around a bit while a world of emotions flooded across his face. He patted his foot gently on the ground.
He said, "It was like the world beneath your feet was melting. Not craters, my boy, like—like rivers. The plasma just... It just stuck to everything! Trees, rock, people, anything. It would burn and keep burning. The medics carried a good 20 pounds of chemical that'd put the stuff out if it got on ya, but it was like bringing a paper towel to a flooding river."
The trail grew dark and eerie as we walked along. Wildlife was nowhere to be found. No birds chirped and the bush was quiet. We came along a strangely shaped rock protruding from a green boulder on the face of the escarpment.
Grandfather stopped cold.
"What is it, grandpa?"
"One of ours" he said.
The protrusion was one of the drive pods of an old Scorpion Main Battle Tank. The green boulder wasn't a boulder at all: it was the rest of the tank. The plasma had melted the vehicle into the escarpment's rock.
Staring at the tank hauntingly, grandfather said, "The plan was to trap the Covenant in the valley below. Hundreds of these tanks lined up along the edge here, and waited in the dark." He shook his head, and added that, "our leaders were from Earth; they'd never fought the Covenant before – most of us hadn't. They were still fighting like the enemy was a bunch of outer colony bums with rifles and stolen 'hogs."
"Outer colony bums?"
"What, they don't teach you about the insurrection?"
"No?"
"What about the Battle of Cosmora Archipelago?"
"I don't know, grandpa."
"Do they even tell you about the Jovian Moons? The Friedans? The old Oil and World Wars on Earth?"
My face turned red as he bombarded me with names, battles, and incidents. When I stopped answering, he looked away from me and gazed over the escarpment unto the quiet valley below.
And then he meekly said, "They laughed, you know, when word came down to abandon Vega."
"Who laughed, grandpa?" I asked.
"The Marines. The ones from Earth."
"Why?"
"They called the colonies 'the glassworks'. The inners used to say the same kinds of things about the outer colonies, too, when I was a kid. But we all shut up when our worlds started burning along with theirs."
And then grandfather got quiet again. We continued down the trail. I followed him into the growing darkness.
Aetiee #3
Date: 3 July 2008, 9:32 pm
Aetiee
By Marty Duffy
July 3, 2008
3.
"Did God help us win the war, grandpa?" I asked somewhat jokingly.
Grandfather immediately answered, "Oh I have no doubt, my boy."
"Why did he help us?"
Grandfather chuckled a bit and looked down at me with a slight grin.
"I've been wondering that myself for fifty years. He don't always make it obvious, you know."
We talked while we were eating juicy figs that we had picked from the trees along the trail. I let grandfather have the ones that had softer skin. They were orange-ish on the outside, and the flesh was a kind of mix between tan and purple. They smelled like woodsy leaves and sugar, and they tasted like the sunset.
The taste impressed upon the conversation. Something inexplicably sad like the setting sun was in grandfather's lowered shoulders, and I could tell by his concerned-looking focus on me that he saw the same sadness in me.
I said, "I wish the sun wasn't going down, grandpa. I like being up here with you."
He replied, "It isn't so bad here."
"I really was scared before. In the car."
"I know."
"Do you think we'll come up here again?"
"Of course!" And then he smiled broadly before adding, "You're very bright, you know."
I cocked my head a bit and said, "What do you mean?"
He playfully scratched my scruffy hair and made it even more of a mess. While I was giggling and trying to pat it down, he said, "I mean that you shine like Vega while others just barely twinkle at night!"
"Thank you grandpa," I said. But my manners were armor. I hid my face from him and stared at my half-eaten fig.
Grandfather said, "My boy, one man's sunset is another man's dawn. You know that?"
I shook my head no. "There'll never be a war again for me to fight in."
"What do you mean by that?" Grandfather said with a bit of outrage.
"You fought the Covenant… I just clean horses."
Grandfather knelt down to face me and gripped my shoulders tightly.
He said, "There was nothing good about that war, Billy. Nothing!"
"I saw your medal grandpa. I saw it in your box. You got to be a hero, you—"
He shook me angrily while saying, "It doesn't mean anything, Billy. It doesn't mean a damn thing!"
I could barely control the muscles in my cheeks and my throat dried up. I squeezed my eyes closed -- refusing to let grandfather see me water up, but my eyelids couldn't hold. I cried.
Grandfather closed his eyes too.
He said, "I'm sorry," under his breath, and I believed him.
"Why was it so bad, grandpa?" I asked between sniffs.
He sighed deep like the answer was lost in a labyrinth.
"First," he said, "There was Orpo. We had to wear big—big masks on our faces. They dropped chlorine, viruses, radiation… It wasn't a thirty second exotic battle like in the movies, my boy, it was my life every day and night. No sleeping! Your muscles burned, your eyes stung and you couldn't even take off the mask to scratch them. Your body was all screwed up without sleep with all these pains and stomach aches and cramps... Bodies were everywhere you looked. The oil fields burning up would jam up the mak... Oh, it was a horror... And this is just marching around, Billy, this isn't even when the fighting was going on."
"What happened in the fighting?"
"We lost and retreated in a snap. Ran to the oil fields for cover in the smoke where they couldn't track us."
"Whoa…" I said as restrained as I could manage. "What happened then?"
"They started glassing us. The plasma raining down looks slow and tumbling in the movies, but believe me, my boy, on the ground… It's like an earthquake is making the whole sky fall on you."
He pointed up the trail ahead and then pointed back down the way we'd just come, and said, "From there to there would've been vaporized just-like-that. It fell so fast you couldn't even see it -- the light would blind you and the heat would cook you."
And then he just stopped talking and walked back in the direction of the parking lot.
"Grandpa?" I asked. "Where're you going?"
"It's late."
"Grandpa, I don't want to go."
He turned, glanced at the sun, and then looked at me.
"The sun is setting, my boy."
"We have time, though."
"But not enough to figure out why God helped us win."
"It's not important, grandpa."
He raised an eyebrow and said, "Not important?" He looked around pointing at the trees and said, "What could be a more important question, my boy?"
I shrugged and gave him the same uncertain look as the one I had given the priest during my first confession when he'd asked me the question, "Do you believe God created the Covenant?"
I was tempted to ask grandfather the same question, but I didn't.
Instead, I walked to him and grabbed his hand. I led him in the other direction. He didn't resist.
We moved quicker along the trail than before. It was quite nearly a jog, in fact.
As he huffed along, he said, "They airlifted us from Orpo along the coast and brought us up here. A million troops, hundreds of tanks, and Longswords hidden under tarps."
The trail narrowed and we had to move single file between the branches. I squeezed Grandfather's hand behind me tighter than before.
"They buried a nuke up here to take some of them with us if we lost.
"The mortar tanks shelled us. Most of our tanks melted and some abandoned us. And then they sent in drop ships. They were swarming all over the sky -- picking us off -- and we thought we were cooked.
"But then the good news started when Hell-jumpers from Bay of Campeche joined us."
Grandfather chuckled warmly. I pulled him along faster.
"Their pods… A lot of them slammed into the drop ships… Cut right through them. Our poor guys bought it, but— but good for them."
And then grandfather stopped speaking as we rushed down the trail briskly and energetically. I knew I was pulling him fast so that we could see all of Aetiee, but I didn't know why it was so important to me for him to see it all. The purple twilight darkened precipitously, but it didn't matter to me. All that mattered was Aetiee. It sang to my feet.
#
40 years ago.
A hologram of a military Class-C artificial intelligence construct named Stukely wrapped itself in thick Moorish silks -- which were also holograms -- in a ridiculous display of annoyance and discomfort for Sgt. Thomas Fallon – his core handler – to notice.
The temper tantrum-prone AI who fancied himself a free-spirited, 17th Century English privateer was "uncomfortable" because dried oil on his hologram projector was distorting his "stage". When he knew Fallon was looking, he waved his arm through the air to demonstrate it being twisted and blurred out of existence in certain spots.
Fallon rolled his eyes and said, "Stukey, I can't clean you and protect you at the same time."
The AI said, "It's Stukely! And while you might receive merriment from neglecting your maintenance duties so that you may serve as my vanguard against an enemy that's 50 kilometers away, I assure you that General Nole will not!"
"Stuke-ly, give me a break. The Covies could be sneaking around in camo right outside that door. I even heard they had a stealth drop ship at SigmaOc..."
Fallon gave Stukely a sly smile, and then turned and started typing on a computer terminal built into his desk.
"Good grief, sir!" Stukely said indignantly. "How is typing on a primitive machine going to 'protect' me!"
"I'm just trying to find out what's going on out there," Fallon said.
"Oh? All you had to do was ask…"
Stukely winked out of view and a hologram of the Geneseo continent of Vega Noir faded onto his holo-projector -- albeit distorted in a couple of small spots. Fallon stood and walked to Stukely's projector as the view zoomed in on the Aetian valley region of the continent's southern coast.
Small beacons representing UNSC transponders blinked all along Aetiee –- an escarpment overlooking the valley. Purple blots representing believed Covenant positions dominated the valley.
"So who's winning?" Fallon asked.
Stukely said, "Well, in orbit—"
"You think I don't know whose winning in orbit? What? is that supposed to be a joke?"
"Indeed, we are defeated in orbit once more, Sergeant, but Covenant casualties were quite significant, I assure you. The Campeche Bay even managed to survive long enough to drop nearly 500 Human Entry Vehicles to reinforce us!"
Fallon shook his head and said, "That's stupid. We could have gotten all those guys down here if they'd just stuffed them into Pelicans."
"Drop ships would have been able to ferry more reinforcements, but the HEVs will surprise the enemy! Surprise is what wins, good Sergeant! There were only 4,000 Italian mercenaries at Alcazar, but their betrayal surprised so many, that—"
"Don't start with your sword-and-sandal war nonsense, Stukey…"
"Sergeant, your ignorance of history never ceases to amaze! I assure you that cannon roared at Alcazar and not arrows. I should rather know, after all… Poor Stukely was decapitated by a Moroccan cannon, which—"
"How about: instead of talking to me about this nonsense, you keep your head in the battle and where it should be?"
Stukely violently flung his cape behind him and raised his nose high into the air, and said, "How dare you! I am coordinating guidance data for a five-thousand ton warship in high orbit, linking targeting data for ten divisions, navigating a hundred corps of tanks, and piloting a dozen reconnaissance flights right at this moment, and all while calculating and adjusting landing coordinates for the HEVs at temperatures of—"
A momentarily panic shocked the AI's holographic body like a heart attack.
"Stukely? You okay?"
"The HEVs have been destroyed," Stukely said. "The General has ordered all forces to retreat from Aetiee immediately. Please secure my processing core and bring me to the corvette, Sergeant; I believe we will be evacuating this world presently."
#
When the sun finally set and we returned to the parking lot, grandfather said, "You want to know what the real story is, my boy?"
"What?"
"The real story is that in '44 Your father was born, and your grandmother and I loved each other so damn much it makes me wish that I—wish that I never made it through Aetiee."
"Grandpa, don't say that."
Grandfather's eyes were watering. I had never seen him cry before. I had no idea what to say or do. And so I hugged him and prayed for him to feel ok.
He sobbed a little when he felt me touch him.
"She was so beautiful, my boy, and sweeter than white clouds."
We held each other close in the parking lot on Aetiee. And even though night-time was upon us, I had a feeling we wouldn't be going home yet.
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