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Aetiee #2
Posted By: Marty<duffym@gmail.com>
Date: 26 June 2008, 3:45 pm
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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.
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