Chapter 47
This was the very first mission I ever ran, on the Duty’s Watch:
We were carrying munitions to the town of Kyoborrekh, in the northern hemisphere of Nitashi.
The insertion point for our arcspace drop was less than four hundred thousand kils from our atmospheric entry point – recklessly close, barely leaving enough distance for a ship to decelerate without ripping both itself and its crew apart.
However, attempting to drop out of arcspace any further away dramatically increased the probability of slamming straight into the Shine’s exclusion cordon, and so at four hundred thousand kils we set our target, and I eased us out of arcspace from the Pilot’s chair at speeds right on the limit of viable transference, the hull screaming from the strain of passing from arcspace to inspace, the walls of my vision rippling as the air in the cockpit struggled, for a moment, to remember what atoms were, to recall that a proton attracted an electron, a neutron glued to a proton.
The deceleration towards the planet’s surface should have taken days; instead we had less than an hour to prepare for entry, which made the boom-crack of the atmospheric heat shield straining against the shock an urgent and immediate alarum.
The sheer pressure of our descent caused an electrical fault in the forward gas tanks.
The electrical fault ignited oxygen storage, sparking a fire that ripped through the first three bulkhead seals before being contained moments before it reached the highly explosive cargo in our main bay.
Opening up airlocks to vent the flames into vacuum had the twin effects of pinging us off-course by a few degrees, which, with a cracked heat shield, we absolutely could not afford, as well as opening up our blackhull shielding enough to alert a passing patrol vessel to our heat signature, resulting in a Shine corvette diverting to come and try to work out what the blip in its scans might be.
Frantic negotiations among the crew ensued; did we continue our descent towards the planet’s surface, try to ride out atmospheric re-entry, try to outrun the approaching corvette, or did we flee back into arcspace to try again another day?
The argument was the loudest, most tearful thing I’d ever seen – and yet between the raging and the roaring and the standard pulling-of-hair, the actual points being made were reasonably cogent.
In the end, the failing oxygen supply was the final factor – even if we could accelerate back to full arcspace speed, the odds of more than a handful of crew making it out with working lungs seemed minimal, and so smack into the atmosphere of Nitashi we went, corvette hot on our heels, and boom went the heat shield and snap-crackle went the electrics as circuits fried and sections burned, and people cowered and huddled together in the command room, that being the only area that Pitt felt safe to fully pressurise, and like a burning meteor we splatted into the planet’s surface, getting lucky enough to land in fairly still coastal waters, near enough a Yeh’haim resistance ship that they were able to get a clamp on us before the cracked hull flooded and we all drowned.
It was my first ever mission as Pilot of the Duty’s Watch, and I found myself serene about the prospect of death, either fiery or aquatic, that was entirely beyond my control.
I think everyone who spends much time in the black eventually reaches this conclusion; against the infinite void you just have to let go of these illusions of agency, and trust to someone else – and to luck – that you’ll be OK.
Afterwards, there was an orgy.
Prolonged, wild sexual celebrations as a form of cathartic emotional relief was, I was told, another fairly standard cultural aspect of the Nitashi, even – if not especially – in these times.
Those few crew members who weren’t Nitashi were invited to participate, in much the same way as you might be invited for a cup of kol in another place.
Pitt asked if I wanted to join too, but there was something in his tone that implied he hoped I wouldn’t say yes, and therefore I did not.
I had imagined the Nitashi resistance would be hiding in caves, or deep-down dark bunkers.
They were not. They lived in villages and towns, met in cafés, hid weapons in domestic basements and attics.
And in every place they gathered there were Shine Corpsec watching, asking questions, offering bribes.
The occupation of Nitashi had already lasted seventeen years, and still the war raged on.
In quiet acts of violence, in brutal night-time murders and civilians gunned down en masse; in censored explosions of hatred and spectacular bombings of ships as they clawed their way to the sky, the war raged on.
In Shine motherships, arriving from Cha-mdo with the last of those who could buy their way out; against the millions fleeing from Tu-mdo, which would be the next world to be hit, arriving with their purchase orders and their displacement orders and their security teams with which they took over the homes, the warehouses, the market stalls of the natives, the war went on.
It was not a spectacular thing of set-piece battles and vicious dogfights.
It was quiet, personal, intimate, waged between people who drank the same water from the same pipes, nodded to the same neighbours, waited in the same rain for the chance to stick a knife in the other’s back.
There was no integration between communities; rather the people of the Shine squatted in armed settlements, glaring at the locals, who glared right back from the refugee camps into which they had been booted, and from where they plotted bloody vengeance.
The Shine said there was plenty of room to go around, plenty of resources, and technically they were right.
But it was not the Shine way to work for what they could simply take, nor ask for what they could murderously seize, and thus the war went on.
On my first run to Nitashi, carrying a cargo of small arms and ammunition, I stayed on board the Duty’s Watch.
Once her hull was as patched as could be, she was hidden beneath the waves in shallow waters, and though I was not forbidden from leaving, it was suggested that I might not enjoy the experience in a way that left little room for doubt as to my crew’s sentiment.
I didn’t especially mind. I found the pollen of Nitashi at basically all times of year, in all biomes, to be a nose-stuffing nightmare, and the day–night cycle was just long enough to throw my body clock entirely out of sync, despite Pitt’s insistence that we observe a similar pattern of shifts on board the Duty.
The vitamin D supplements I was prescribed in space, I had to continue on the planet’s surface beneath its insipid sun; and though the gravity was comfortable, the slightly elevated chlorine content in sea and wind made my skin itch.
Thus, alone, I drifted through the ship, while my crewmates went about their business.
The inner corridors were cold metal, lifeless to me after the warm nooks and flowering crannies of the Emni.
The only real adornment was the swirls of colour and lines that were the soul-names of the crew who had flown this ship before and were flying it now.
There was no way to phonetically express these images out loud, and their content ranged from the jaggedly abstract through to the simplest depiction of a budding flower.
As the people of Nitashi lived, so their soul-names evolved, growing from the first dots of colour chosen as a child to great canvases of paint and ink, expressing lives lived, stories told.
It was utterly unacceptable to ask which of these images sweeping across the halls belonged to who.
Whole mountains in Nitashi were painted with names, ancient histories carved and swirled into the sides of cliffs.
The Shine had tried to blast them clean, the ultimate desecration; but the dead of Nitashi outnumbered the living by hundreds of millions, and not even Corpsec could wipe their legacy clean.
Sometimes at night I would sneak out of the Duty’s Watch on a little inflatable, and sit in the dark, tethered to the hull by a single rope, watching the fishermen and their glowing lights across the water as they tried to lure shoals of flitting bullet fish to their nets.
Even on the boat, a collapsible, temporary thing, someone had tattooed a part of themselves, pricked out in little dots of ink.
I wondered who they were, and knew that the atoms of my being were growing thin in the darkness of the night, and for the first time in a long while was not afraid.
Thus the war raged above and I stayed below, patching up whatever needed a casual repair, wandering the halls, reading old papers on unfamiliar themes – Pitt had been advised to keep my curiosity sated, and provided a constant influx of new academic texts – waiting for whatever next I was told to do, by whoever it was who had decided that they were in charge of this mess.