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You play with fire, you’re going to get burned.
Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Nearly all men can stand adversity. If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” It might scandalize my fellow Americans to say it, but Mr. Lincoln failed his own test by almost any measure. Suspension of habeus corpus, our first conscripted armies, breaking West Virginia off as a separate state with only the thinnest of technically legal fictions. But he’d been a national hero in the United States, because history is written by the winners.
There is no way to give a person power that can only be used for good. Any power can be abused, especially government power. If there’s one lesson we should have learned as a species by now, that’s it. So it didn’t surprise anyone that demons could subvert human rulers. It’s just that we never knew who until the damage was done.
But let me start at the beginning.
It felt like we were coming home.
Asina and I had been working to improve the lot of Calmenans for most of our adult lives. It had started within a year of Imperial contact; I’d rescued her from being a breeding slave to the human agaani of Calmena. She’d turned out to be operant; after her training she was recruited to return to Calmena and selected me as her assistant. We’d spent twenty Imperial years (35 local) in N’yeschlass, teaching them about blacksmithing and related fields that used blacksmithing’s products, during which time I’d also gone operant. Then we’d spent over forty Imperial years in Windhome Bay, advancing their art of shipbuilding and related things like fishing and trading. In that time, the people of Wimarglr Continent, southern Taalmisch Continent, and the Atlantean Chain of islands between them had advanced from barely Iron Age to mostly 19th century Earth equivalent.
We’d taken fifty Imperial years on Earth to raise a small family, time enough for most of the changes to hit Grawlshar and Hashiboor Continents. In the end, however, we’d been pulled back by the knowledge the job wasn’t done yet. We’d spent forty years working on improving their mining and chemical industries before taking most of a year off between contracts. Now we were headed back to Calmena.
It would be even more of a homecoming for Asina – our new station would be Yalskarr, on Hashiboor Continent – close to enough to spit on the place where she’d been born, as long defunct as it was. Better than an Earth century later, I’d bet on her in a confrontation with any of her former masters; she’d been a Councilor in N’yeschlass, led Windhome Bay as its Elder, borne and raised three more children, and was as polished and sophisticated a lady as existed on Earth, but she still harbored rage and feelings of inadequacy when it came to her former masters, even though they all had to be long dead.
The first time we did this, it was to teach them to forge metal. Now we’re going to teach about marine diesels and aircraft. We were in Svalbard Base, waiting for our ride to Bolthole Base. Outside, arctic winter swirled. Ififths of snow blanketed the ground; thick shifting grinding sheets of ice covered the sea. Inside, it was shirtsleeve weather – not so much as dribbles of melted snow said otherwise.
Eventually, our cutter pilot loaded us on board, together with a team of 8 soldiers with their combat suits. They stood their suits against the bare wall in the back and sat in the seats that lined the side of the small craft’s cargo hold. We took the front two slots on the right side, which left the front two slots on the left vacant. The little ship lifted, Vectored as soon as it was clear of the hangar, and appeared perhaps two iprime from Calmena. Epsilon Indi was an orange light behind us. The pilot slowed us to a practical crawl – less than 12 isquare per hour, lest we scatter sonic booms over half the continent upon encountering atmosphere. We were coming in dayside, so we had a camouflage screen up as well as shields. The Calmenans didn’t have radar yet, but they had the means to develop it as soon as they needed to. Since Asina and I were coming to introduce airplanes to their world, radar would follow as naturally as sunset follows sunrise.
Our first destination was Bolthole Base, high up in the most inaccessible area of the Collision Range on Wimarglr Continent. A lot of work went into keeping natives from realizing it was there, from holographic projectors to avoidance fields and forbiddings with auros. In the long run, they’d find it, but the general thinking was the long-awaited rematch between the fractal demons and the Empire would be underway before then, rendering it a moot point.
There’s a moment on approach when you make a mental shift from thinking you’re in space getting closer to the planet to thinking you’re on the planet even though you’re not on the ground yet. For me, it’s when I start being able to make out individual features in the video feed. The nameless mountain in which Bolthole Base was embedded was usually it, followed by the small alpine meadow below the base. The mountain itself – second highest peak on the planet – was perpetually ice crowned, even though it was no higher than Mount Whitney in California and within a couple degrees of the planetary equator. There wasn’t time in Calmena’s short year of 145 Earth days (136 Imperial or local) for the snow that fell to melt. The lake below waxed and waned with the weather.
The pilot picked up the approach path, and slowing still further apparently headed straight towards the side of the mountain. At the last moment, the illusion of solidity melted and the viewscreen showed a massive cavern holding fifty or sixty Starbirds and cutters. The base and the cavern holding it had expanded in the time I’d been here, but it was still too small for anything bigger than cutters to land.
The base commander, Sephia, was waiting to greet us. Sephia looked like a blonde college coed of my youth, her white-blonde pageboy cut barely ruffling in the sheltered cavern. “Welcome back, my young friends!” she greeted the two of us. As soon as she opened her mouth, her attitude and manner of speaking betrayed the fact that she was old for a natural state human – perhaps a full square by now. I didn’t know exactly – what I did know was she’d held a higher rank than she did now at the end of the Reunification, three thousand Imperial years ago. Except for occasional leave, she’d been base commander for over an Earth century now, and she had no intention of applying for promotion. “This is where the next war with the demons will start,” she’d told me when I first arrived. Taking a promotion would mean leaving Calmena for her.
Copyright 2019 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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