Setosha - the Beating Heart
Copyright© 2010 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 11
Home System
Captain Anthony Pagadan watched the planet the Ladies had named Home grow in the passenger cabin’s vidscreen. They had passed the worst of the debris ring a few minutes ago. There were no more of those subtle vector changes as their pilot maneuvered to avoid putting her shuttle where a rock was going to be. He could hear a faint whisper of sound as the shuttle’s hull entered Home’s atmosphere.
His eyes drifted from the view of the planet, a blur of white clouds and blue oceans, to the riot of colors in the other vidscreen. He knew from his previous visit that the nebula covered more than 70% of the sky when seen from the surface of Home. In many ways, it was the only feature in the sky, night or day. Somehow, he didn’t find it strange that the shuttle’s second camera was always pointed at the nebula.
“I can’t get over how beautiful that is,” he said quietly.
“Beautiful, and deadly,” Corey said from beside him. “For all the colors of the sky, none of us are really happy in space or on the ground until we get a magnetic field or lots of water and dense concrete between us and all that energy.”
“What’s it like seeing all that through your shuttle? I’ve tried to imagine it, but I can’t.”
Corey considered her answer and then shook her head. “There aren’t any words for it. You have no idea how many times we’ve wished there were. It’s not just seeing. One sense, even human sight, just doesn’t have the ... bandwidth.” She smiled at the common PSK word she had only recently learned. “There’s so much more to feel, hear, smell, and taste when you don’t confine yourself to the visual part of the spectrum.”
Captain Pagadan smiled wistfully. “I wish there was a way to try it myself, but I suppose there isn’t. I won’t give up on it, though. Our scientists ought to be able to simulate at least part of it with the right technology. What can you describe about it?”
Corey stared at the vidscreen in silence, considering. “We call it The Glory,” she said at last, her voice low. “You’ll hear pilots refer to being ‘Up in the Glory’.” She stared at the vidscreen for a bit. “I’ll tell you what we do when we’re training people, and you’ll have to imagine what that’s like.
“We start by exposing trainees to the input through their shunt. We usually do it one sensory organ at a time, and in gradually increasing intensities. Some of it is just enhancing what already exists. Your skin senses heat--we map the surrounding infrared directionally and at proportionally increased intensities. Your tongue is like your skin, but recognizes intensities of flavor and several distinctly different kinds of those, each of which we can map for parts of the spectrum. Neutron flux, for example, tastes sour. To a fighter pilot, a really sour day is the kind that puts her in the hospital for a month or two, if she’s lucky. Taste is no good for direction, but pilots are trained to use their brains and the parts of the spectrum they can see or hear or feel to understand what is happening around them.
“Your body is not just surrounded with sensations, you’re immersed in them. Every sense is filled with some part of what surrounds you. But you have to work in The Glory. You can’t just cut yourself off and drift along in it. That’s hard, because it is so beautiful. It takes time to train people to work up there, and not everyone can do it. It requires a lot of self-discipline, and you either learn, or fail.”
“Fail? What do you mean fail?”
“The Glory is both dangerous and addictive,” she said. “We have some people who will live the rest of their existence in the Glory because they literally can’t bear to be separated from it. Over the years, we’ve tried curing some of them. A lot of those people died; the unlucky ones didn’t. Those who have chosen to remain in the Glory, we call Mechanicals. They’re attached to a machine, a fighter, or a pilot module, and experience life only through their shunt. In essence, they have become a machine, but a machine with a human at its center.
“We supply them with food, fuel, medical, mechanical, and other services for their labor. Sometimes, even that is not enough. I’ve seen a few burned out with anger or fatigue, totally lost in the Glory. We can’t help them. If they won’t come back to Fleet even for food and fuel, they don’t last long.”
Corey glanced at him, concern writ large on her face. “Captain, once you start down that path, you will find you cannot easily leave it. Work in the Glory has cost us dearly. Decades before the first Idenux blighted our existence, we were losing several people a year to the Glory. The war has only increased that. Because of where we live, we have no choice but to continue to work there and to continue trying to understand what it does to us.
“It took us decades to develop what pilots use now, and of course, it’s not just pilots. Weapons officers and gunners on every ship and fort use the same system. Commanders use it to manage battles. Air and space traffic controllers use it every day.” She fell silent, looking at him expectantly, knowing there would be questions.
He grinned apologetically. “Do you have a high failure rate?”
“You mean people who can’t adapt? Not high, but we have a few. Generally, we find those people early in their training and steer them in some other direction. A few simply can’t take all of the Glory. We move them to jobs where they don’t need it all, or maybe don’t need any of it. Those are actually a much smaller worry for us. There is always a lot of work that does not require touching the Glory. It’s the other failures that really hurt. We can’t know if a little less flight time might have kept that pilot with us, or maybe she needed more time up in the Glory. Maybe she just needed some time with her sibs and family. We know a few people go mechanical for personal reasons. But for the rest of us...” Her voice trailed off, and she stared at the Nebula.
“The shunt and the Glory are a blessing and a curse all wrapped up in the same package. We can’t have one without the other. Everything exacts a price, especially the shunt.”
“You’re telling me that we’ll never be able to duplicate the shunt with our technology,” Captain Pagadan said quietly.
She sighed and gave him a small, defeated smile. “Your scientists are very clever, Captain. They may come up with a way to do it, though I do not think they will feel a compelling need to. We had to do it. The method we use now was within reach of our technology two hundred years ago, and we had no choice.
“We live in a dangerous place, Captain. We knew hiding on Home was death. Sooner or later, a big enough rock would hit us, and that would be the end of everything. We had to go into space. We could not use computers to guide our ships. I could tell you stories, Captain, of the courage of our earliest pilots. If you want heroism, Captain, they had it in quantities too large to measure. They flew without shunts under the Glory, but not in it. Too many of them were returned to their families in urns, or not returned at all. There is nothing like grim necessity to focus the attention of an entire generation of biologists and engineers. The shunt, and a lot of work, made Home relatively safe for us. We still work at that every day, but the tasks are so much a part of our lives now that nobody can imagine not going into space to stop a meteor strike. It’s just another job, like weeding the garden. Once that first step was taken, the next step, to the stars, and then contact with other people ... it all came from the shunt and learning to work up in the Glory.”
She fell silent, her eyes still on the vidscreen showing the Nebula.
“You seem worried,” he said. Four weeks on this trip, and three months of combat operations together before that, had given him opportunities to learn some of her moods. He also felt a freedom to talk with her that he would not have dared with any other woman in the Families. This was the first opportunity he’d had to really talk with her, though. Ever since transferring from Pegasus, he’d been treated as fragile cargo. “What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing much.” He just looked at her, raising a skeptical eyebrow. She recognized the gesture and shrugged. “Oh, all right. I’m worried about going home.”
“I thought you’d be happy about that. I know how important family is to you, and I’d think you’d be eagerly looking forward to it.”
Her sour smile was entirely unexpected. “There were difficulties the last time I was home. I was under a lot of pressure to resign from the Navy. My siblings have told me things have changed for the better. I’m not convinced. I’ll have to see it to believe it.”
“And you’re wondering if they’ll still treat you like that.” Captain Pagadan nodded, understanding her worry. “You aren’t the same person you were before, Corey. You’re older. You’ve been a Commander, not just a pilot. You’ve been an ... an Eldest. Responsibility has changed you, and they know you better now. There must have been stories about your career. There are certainly several about you in your Navy.
“Now don’t give me that look. I’ve seen the way the others look at you, and they’ll have told their relatives back home. Whatever you remember from before must have changed. You’re probably no longer the little girl who went off to war, not to them. Now you’re a hero.” She started to protest, and he waved that away. “You are, and you know it.”
He stretched out in his seat. It wasn’t surprising to him that they had the compartment entirely to themselves. The more he got to know these people, the more he understood some of the odd things about them. Take their attitude towards men. Men were precious. Men were to be protected, kept safe from accident, hazard, and harmful radiation. Seeing a man walking around outside without protection was highly disturbing to them. Corey was probably the only person on the shuttle who could comfortably sit in this compartment with him.
“I remember my first homecoming,” he said, staring at the view of the Nebula. “I had just graduated from the Academy. My mother had always planned for me to become a man of business. Yes, a frightening thought, isn’t it? It didn’t matter to anyone that I wanted to go into space. It didn’t matter that I had worked as hard as I could to be accepted into the Academy. It didn’t matter that I had earned a commission and wore the King’s Coat. No, when I went home I was still little Tony who had disappointed Mother. None of my relatives saw Lieutenant Anthony Pagadan of the People’s Navy. It was very frustrating, and in a way, disappointing.
“Now when I visit Mother and Father I see how proud they are of what I do, even when I can’t tell them what it is.”
Corey smiled politely. She knew he was trying to make her feel better. She also knew her worries would not go away until she saw how the Family accepted her return. She would know soon enough. They were almost ready to land.
“Are you starting to work immediately?” She wanted to push her worries away. Maybe talking about work would help.
Captain Pagadan nodded slightly. “A Third Officer who didn’t give me her name said I would be met when we landed. I’ll see from there. I’m not sure what kind of greeting I’ll get.”
“I think you’ll get more cooperation than you expect,” Corey said. “I know an intelligence analyst. She remarked once that she would give almost anything for a fresh viewpoint that would double-check what she’s been looking at.”
“Even from a man?” he asked. “I wasn’t thinking of the professional meetings, I was thinking of the social aspects.”
“They may surprise you,” Corey laughed. “When those gals are working, they tune out nearly everything around them. When the Idenux raided Home several years ago, some of the analysts stayed at their desks through the whole thing. They were so focused on their work that they ignored an Idenux fighter that shot up the buildings right across the street from them.” She laughed. “If only the Idenux knew how close they came to crippling our intelligence effort.”
“You seem to know them pretty well. Nobody I’ve talked to, with the exception of that one who didn’t tell me her name, even admits they exist.”
“And yet you knew they did.” Corey smiled. “How did you find out?”
“Well, first, Captain Young told me about a briefing he attended. Several of your people who did that kind of work were introduced, though he didn’t tell me anything else about it. Second, you’ve been looking to get your lost ones back for a long time. It only stands to reason that you would have people dedicated full time to intelligence gathering.”
“I bow to your superior deductive reasoning,” Corey said, laughing. “I certainly can’t dispute it.”
The vidscreens went gray as they entered the clouds above First Landing. “I want to apologize for what was going on in New Republic,” he said over the soft hiss of air against the hull. “There are people--”
“Forget it,” she said. “We’re used to it.”
“To all of the innuendo and slander?”
She shrugged. “We talk among ourselves, and the stories some of the others tell about the way we’re treated get around.”
“Will you satisfy my own curiosity? Are some of those stories true?”
She searched his face. “You mean our men?”
“That, too.”
She shrugged again. “What is there to talk about? Men in the Families are a very precious commodity. You’ll see that soon enough. It may or may not affect the way you’re treated, which is why I’m telling you this. Despite the more lurid reports I heard on New Republic, they have their own lives. Like most, I don’t have any contact with them, but that was a decision our ancestors made. They’d observed that when one gender greatly outnumbered the other, there was fighting and stress. We couldn’t afford that, not if we were going to survive. We took the logical solution.” She smiled. “We are, after all, a very logical people.”
“Most people in the PSK would not believe that. Back home, men are considered the logical ones, and women the emotional ones.”
“We’ve had no choice. There are times for emotions, but when it comes to our survival, there isn’t.”
“How much of an emotional life do you have? I know you’re close to your sib-sisters, but...”
“You mean, are those stories about us having intimate friends true? Yes, and no. That’s an individual choice. I don’t, but I can’t speak about anyone else.” She shook her head slightly. “I know it happens, but I’ve never been interested in it. There’s this war, you see, and...”
“Forgive me for asking. I’m just worried that things like that will affect what I’m here for.”
“It shouldn’t. Most people are adult enough to not let their personal lives intrude too much in their professional.”
They burst into daylight. The view in the screens shifted, and they could see the Fleet base at First Landing.
“I hope you get what you came for,” she said, checking her seat harness and tugging at his. He smiled appreciatively, and she blushed, caught “protecting” the male again.
“I hope you enjoy your homecoming,” he said quietly, and “thank you for answering my questions.”
“I hope I helped.”
The landing was gentle, disembarkation quick, and the passengers hurried off in all directions. Corey watched as Captain Pagadan was escorted into a nearby building, relieved that he was so quickly under cover. It felt good to be able to show that reaction. She saw it reflected in the faces around her. That, almost more than anything else, told her she was home.
Early the next morning, as her transport circled above the Navy base at Mountain Home, Corey could see Sonia and Heather waiting outside one of the gates along with her mother’s sib-sisters. They were talking among themselves, ignoring the transport above them. She was glad they were meeting her. She’d dreaded flying out to Red Ridges by herself, brooding about her homecoming the entire time.
Corey raced through her leave paperwork as fast as she could, trying to ignore the fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach. Nervous? Of course not. It was normal for sweat to trickle down her back on a cool spring morning. She used her sleeve to wipe the clammy moisture off her face and made her trembling fingers hold the pen. Reading and signing the last document, she pushed the stack across the counter, then turned and walked quickly to the gate. She paused at the white line on the vitreous concrete that marked where Fleet regulations stopped and Family rules and obligations began. Members of her Family watched from just a few meters away while she completed the formalities of taking leave.
“All correct, ma’am,” the Marine Senior said finally, looking up from Corey’s orders. “Have fun. See you in ten days.”
Corey drew a deep breath and tried to squelch her nervous jitters. When she had last stood on this side of the line, she had been a brand-new Squadron Lead on personal leave while undergoing a routine transfer between ships. Today she was a Captain between assignments. She had an interview with Captain Ellen Monterra about her new job eleven days from now on this very base. And none of that Navy business would make the next few minutes any easier.
“This is hard,” she muttered to the Marine Senior.
“Aye, ma’am, it is.” The Senior had read Corey’s decorations and was impressed. She’d seen the signature, so she knew who this officer was, but, true to the 50-year-old traditions of the Marines, she didn’t let her expression show any emotion. “In some ways, combat is easier. The worst that can happen to you in combat is that you get killed. Here, you can disappoint those you love.” She noted Corey’s artificial hand. The Marine’s right foot was the same, which was how she had earned a base guard slot on Home until she could pass her physicals again. “Good luck, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” Corey said gratefully. She returned the Marine’s salute and stepped across the line into the civilian world.
Her expression serious, Corey dropped the bag containing a few personal possessions and bowed, hands clasped before her. “A daughter has returned to the bosom of her family,” she said, formally showing respect for those who waited.
“And what has the daughter, who has been away from the family for over a year, brought to ease her homecoming?” Her Aunt Carol also kept strictly to the ritual, her manner equally stiff and formal.
“I bring the rank and prestige of Captain,” Corey responded. She bowed again, to the second of the two elders, her Aunt Alexa. “And I bring four birthrights.”
The previous time her aunts had been surprised at her awards. Not any longer. Captain Pagadan had been right, her successes were apparently as well known inside the family as they were in the Navy.
Aunt Carol blinked, and something bright rolled down her cheek. “Welcome home, dear,” she said, her voice husky with tears not yet shed. Formality was gone as she opened her arms, opened the arms of the family, to Corey. “Well and truly welcome home, daughter Corey.”
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