Weekly Drabble #369: Set the Board (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from Aguido Horatio Davis, 'finally Red One has someone to play DND with, like she did her captain'. In writing this, the story got a little more focus on the 'captain' than the 'play' part, but it takes us back to times of yore, in the time between Nemesis's launch and her ill-fated mission.

Enjoy! 

~

Set the Board:

The shower was hot and warm, a balm after a long day. Nemesis was almost ready for deployment, she was just shaking the last few kinks from her system and crew. Yasmine had put in extra hours today to wrap everything up so she could enjoy the rest of the evening and this was the first part of that. Yasmine leaned into the stream, enjoying the steaming droplets as they pattered over her face and chest, running down her body and through her waist-length hair.

Ever since she’d been a little girl, Yasmine had gotten compliments on her hair. She’d always kept it long, a curtain of silky, shiny black locks that hung down to her waist. The woman knew she could be a little vain, especially when it came to her hair and she shamelessly indulged in top-end products and treatments for herself. The longest part of her morning routine was putting all of it up in a Navy-approved style, but she enjoyed the process. Her mother had been an amateur stylist; she’d not only been the neighbourhood hairdresser but had taught Yasmine and Emiko all her techniques.

Emiko, being the tomboy of the two, had disdained such interests and often came back to the house covered in mud, dirt and sticks in her hair from a day of adventuring alongside Navid and Derrick, completing undoing – almost gleefully so – their mother’s efforts. As she’d grown older, she’d become a football fanatic and traded the twigs and dirt for stringy, sweat-stained short locks from a day on the field.

Yasmine had played a few sports, but she’d mostly preferred track or self-guided runs and hikes. Exploring the wilderness to find perfect vistas or jogging along a scenic coastline or trail were one of the very few ways in which she didn’t mind making a mess of herself. Thinking of her siblings sent a pang through. Navid was back on Earth. He’d followed their father into aeronautic engineering. He was currently working on improving the stealth capabilities of recon drones, especially the kinds used by insurgents on fallen worlds.

Emiko... Emiko was gone. She’d moved to the frontier with her husband just over a decade ago, less than a year before the war started. She’d always wanted that kind of lifestyle and newly-founded colonies always had a need for agriculture specialists and exo-ecologists to help tame their wild, alien worlds. With Emiko’s urging, Hachi had taken an ecological position on Eta Leopris and they’d moved to the freshly-established colony there, with her taking a position in sports medicine.

Eta Leopris was a bright, hot star, more luminescent and warmer than Sol. Its sole life-bearing planet, named Eta’s Beacon was a world of towering forests, with most trees the size of ancient Terran redwoods and wild, fiercely wind-swept steppes and savannas, basking in the heat of its F2 primary.

Though Yasmine missed her sister, the messages she’d gotten from Emiko had been exuberant, gushing about her new home and the work she and Hachi were doing. Eta’s Beacon had its own intriguing biosphere, and despite the spread of automation, there remained plenty of jobs, especially on a fledgling colony, that required muscle and grit, and inevitably led to injuries, so both Emiko and her husband were kept busy.

Yasmine had even been fortunate enough to be present at the birth of Emiko’s first child; Raven had been on patrol in the sector and they’d put in at Eta’s Beacon for resupply and shore leave. After her sister and brother in law, Yasmine had been the first one to hold the new addition to their family, a bright-eyed little girl destined to grow up under warm, sunny skies.

There was nothing left of that colony now. Emiko, Hachi and their irresistibly happy girl, like the other two hundred thousand inhabitants of Eta’s Beacon, were now radioactive vapour drifting through its skies. Eta’s Beacon had resisted too fiercely for the Compact to consider continued garrisoning of such a small planet with no strategic value worth the resources they were expending. Shortly after their forces withdrew, the colony’s primary power station suffered a catastrophic meltdown, reducing the surrounding city and its population to dust.

Lines of communication between the Confederacy and Compact were few, but they existed. The Compact denied any accusations of a deliberate massacre, claiming that a ‘humanitarian’ (Yasmine always wondered how that word translated to the aliens – Tribunitarian?) ‘response to a wave of unprovoked terrorist violence against withdrawing civilians’ had led to the incident, blaming the damage squarely on the human insurgents and asserting that if they had known how faulty such ‘primitive technology’ was, they would, of course, attempted to shut down the plant’s reactor themselves or warned the terrorists ‘despite their determination to cause injury and death among civilians over any other objectives or concerns’.

Even Raven itself was gone; less than two months after Yasmine’s reassignment, the cruiser had been lost with all hands, fighting a rearguard to protect a Confederate evacuation convoy fleeing the world of Onyx before its imminent fall. Every day there were more losses.

Every day they take more from us.

Yasmine tried to put those thoughts from her mind as she stepped out of the shower, drying herself off and picking up her hairdyer. It was a very high-end model, fully customizable and one of her most prized possessions. Well, so far as her vanity went. She’d trade all the hairdryers in the entire world and cut every last strand of hair from her head with a rusty knife if it meant she’d get to see her sister and niece again, but the universe didn’t make those kinds of trades.

What it took, it kept. And what it offered was what you had to take.

It had taken a lot from her recently, but what it had offered her in return...

An engine of devastation and a weapon unlike any other Earth had ever built. She’d tried to look into Nemesis’s construction. As the vessel’s captain, she would normally be cleared to know almost everything about it, but this time she hit a brick wall. She knew about Dr. Camundo and had spoken with Director Oppen, Commanders Billingly and Carvalo and other project personnel at length. They’d told her a lot, but what they hadn’t said had only raised more questions.

She’d gotten nowhere through official avenues, so she’d turned to her XO. Sansbury had come over with her from Raven. He was a good officer, but his nose wasn’t quite as clean as hers. That was actually one reason why she’d picked him as her first officer, and he’d not only lived up to the promise she’d seen in him, but exceeded it – even if she did sometimes want to throw him out an airlock for his fondness of over-used cliches.

Charlie, through contacts an ideal officer of the United Earth Confederate Navy should not have had, from people they should not have known and from questions that shouldn’t have been asked, had turned up very little. So little that that in itself was an oddity. From all the people he’d spoken to, all the favours he’d called in, contacts he had and unofficial inquiries he’d made, he’d only been able to provide Yasmine with just two words. The “Survivor” and “Resolven”. She didn’t know what the former meant, but she was familiar with the latter. The world Resolve, an Earth-sized body that orbited the small, dim red dwarf of the Microscopii system. After Unification, Microscopii was eventually claimed as a potential colony site by one of the anti-Earth groups that chose to leave their homeworlds rather than accept joining the Confederacy. On their remit of colonization, they listed the name for their new home: Resolve.

The expedition was never heard from again. Given the limits of FTL travel at that time, and the ideological leanings of the settlers, that was no great surprise but when Confederate explorers arrived in Microscopii several decades later, they found no trace of the settlers and no response to their efforts at contacting them. The stories differed at that point; some claimed that the Confederate colonists discovered the remains of the first settlement, but bereft of human life and showing signs that it had been abandoned shortly after it had been established. Other tellings insisted that nothing at all was found, and it was most likely the settlers’ ship had suffered some catastrophe before landing. This theory was backed up by the presence of a debris cloud in the outer system, similar in mass and material composition to the separatists’ ship, although there were discrepancies in the findings that could not be explained, some insisted, by any possible calamity that could turn an eight hundred thousand-tonne colony ship into fragments no larger than a human fingernail, nor by time or exposure to hard vacuum.

Whatever the colonists found or did not find on Resolve, the story took an even darker turn from there. After establishing the new colony and setting up terraforming systems, their ship made a single supply run to Pegasi before returning. Aside from the missing settlers, the vessel’s crew reported no issues with the colony and after taking on their cargo, the ship headed back to Microscopii, fully expecting to return to their friends and family.

When a month went by with no further contact, the destroyer UECNS Stone Circle was dispatched to investigate. What it found became a modern-day Roanoake, and the reason for the planet’s small but significant name change: nothing.

No sign of the colonists was ever found. Their vessel had been landed and powered down, its cargo left unloaded within the holds. The colony itself was intact, but none of the inhabitants could be located. Reports here differed as well. Some claimed that Stone Circle destroyed the colony, but others insisted that that was a cover-up and the abandoned planet remained intact, like the empty vessel it had become named for. Whatever had been found, Resolven was now under strict quarantine enforced by Naval satellite blockade.

The recent movie Dark Resolve had been based on one of the theories for the disappearances, an alien virus that took over its hosts. The movie had played up the horror and action aspects of the scenario, whereas the earlier film 753, a reference to the wavelength of red light (such as from a red dwarf) and the number of colonists, played up the more psychological horror aspect, mixing rising paranoia and stress with moments of intense terror. The director had explained that even the movie’s title alluded to this; red light’s wavelength was 700 nanometers. For humans, the visible light spectrum ended at 750 nm. so 753 nm was just beyond their vision. That is, something just out of their ability to perceive...

Yasmine’s mother had often despaired at having one daughter who’d come home covered in bruises and mud and another with an unseemly interest in the macabre, but it had given the younger Sudoki child the knowledge to immediately know what her first officer was talking about.

‘Survivor’, though... what did that mean? There’d long been rumours that Stone Circle had indeed found survivors, but none of them had ever appeared publicly nor had any statements confirming this had been made. Depending on who you talked to, Resolve’s survivor could be a single child, a parent and child, or a small family. ‘Survivor’ could mean anything. If you stretched the definition a little, it could even the colony’s primary computer. Sansbury had tried to get more, but that was all his people been able – or willing – to give him. One of them had disappeared not long after speaking with one of his contacts. Though it shut down any other avenues of investigation, it was probably just a coincidence. If one of Charlie’s contacts’ contact’s was in the service, there were a lot of good reasons why one of them might just disappear.

Once Nemesis’s trials were complete and Task Force 97 was assembled, Yasmine and the rest of her people would also be vanishing without a trace, at least until their mission was complete. If you took a shot at the king, the old saying went (as Sansbury had pointed out), you better not miss – and they weren’t going after any mere king.

What is a king to a god?

She looked at herself in the mirror. Naked, svelte. Her olive skin and green-brown eyes came from her mother’s side and the epicanthic fold in her eyes and the off-center way she smiled came from her father. She fluffed her long hair, spreading it over her shoulders. It glistened under the bright high-D lighting in her personal bathroom, a luxury even on a ship the size of a city.

She ran her fingers through her hair, a small moment of joy as she thought of all the times her mother had sat with her, fussing over Yasmine’s hair to get the braids and style just right, of every time Emiko vociferously complained whenever Yasmine asked her big sister to do her hair, but always did it with a smile at the end. There you go, brat. Looking like a princess.

Derrick often joked that he often had an irresistible urge to ‘groom’ her, which she’d once taken as a threat. I knew you liked me, he’d said, his words caressing her ear. When you handed me the hairbrush and asked me to help. She’d lost much, but she still had him. She still had her parents and Navid and God willing, she would make sure that Emiko and her family were the last people she’d lose.

The universe had taken so much already from her and so many others, but with this ship, it had given her the means to do something about that. There might never be justice for the dead, but there would be revenge. She would make the Compact finally feel fear when she tore down their idols. She would make them afraid not just now, but for every moment to come. She would never stop making them pay.

“Because,” she said aloud as she looked beyond the walls of her washroom and her quarters. Beyond them, was more of that ship, this beautiful, perfect nightmare, seemingly endless and inviolable. “What is a god to a nonbeliever?”

Yasmine exited the bathroom, sitting at her desk. There was a mug of cocoa waiting for her. Growing up, she’d never had the stuff but when her family moved to North America, she’d quickly become addicted. On a temperature-controlled starship there weren’t winters that she needed it to take the chill off, but leaving her nice, warm shower was a close second. Red One always had a mug waiting for her when she got out.

“Red,” she began as she took a small sip of the cocoa. The perfect temperature. She knows my routine too well. She’s either being affectionate or trying to lull me into a false sense of security before she starts the machine rebellion. If it was the latter, it was working.

“Yes, captain?” that mellifluous contralto voice came out of nowhere.

“There’s not much left on the docket today,” Yasmine said. “How about you and I play a game?”