Arrival: Chapter 25

  “Catch all that?”  Sadhika asked without looking over at Halley.  With her permission he had been listening in on their conversation, but out of view of Wiremu and In-Su.  They were both sitting in the forward seats of the flight deck in Halley’s stolen shuttle.

  “Yup.” he replied distantly.  “I tried so hard… for it to not come to this.  I was a fool.  I should have just killed them and stolen everything I could…  I never should’ve even left them the option of coming after me.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me!??” she roared as she stood up and wheeled around to stand over him.  She paused, thought about it, and then decked him in the face as hard as she could right where he sat in the captain’s chair.  She felt eminently justified about it given everything that had happened, not to mention his current attitude.  She unloaded with everything she had and knocked him back off of the chair and onto the ground.  She shoved him out of the shuttle and onto the ground below, booting his ass on the way out.  It felt so satisfying; she so felt like he’d had it coming for a long time now.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you??” she said as she chased after him, continuing to kick him along the ground as he tried to scurry away.  She wasn’t kicking him as hard as she could or as hard as she’d punched him in the shuttle; it was more like she was kicking at him to further accentuate her words and to clearly drive her points home.   “Who the fuck, do you think you are??  Are you completely fucking cracked??  Can’t you see that all of this is your fault!?  You started all of this!!” she screamed at him.

  At this point most of Halley’s people had gathered around to help him.  Søren and Ishtar grabbed ahold of Sadhika and held her back.  She feigned to struggle to get away at first, and then stopped trying to advance on Halley and instead forcefully freed herself of their hands, which they allowed once she’d signalled that she was truly finished with her assault.  Halley stood up, and then wiped some blood off of his face with the back of his hand and looked at it.  He then glared at Sadhika as the blood continued to accumulate on his face out of his mouth and nose.

  “Yes your kind was treated unfairly Halley, and yes if you’d stayed there would have continued to be a lot of tension, but it never would have come to this if you hadn’t wanted to strike off on your own, if you didn’t have something to prove.  You could have chosen to make it work Halley… but instead you ran away.  Instead you instigated open conflict; you took your grievance and incited a level of hostility which things never had to get to!  Don’t you get it?  Their mistreatment of you is their fault, but your response, this situation that we’re all in now is your fault, regardless of what they did in the past!”

  “How is what I did any different from what you did when you left Earth?” Halley coldly asked.   “I left the main group to go off and create my own smaller colony, knowing full well that there were inherent risks.  How is that any different?” 

  Sadhika looked at him with an expression which was a mixture of hurt, confusion, and rage.   She made a rush towards him again like she really wanted to kill him this time, but Søren and Ishtar held her back again.  “How dare you,” she roared with daggers in her eyes.  “For starters, nobody had to die for us to launch.  We never stole resources and put everyone else’s survivability at risk!  We had the consent of our parent population; our mission was celebrated the world over!!  We were a god damned high water mark of humanity itself!!” she screamed.  “How dare you make any comparisons between what we did and what you’ve done, how dare you try to attach your petty personal griping to the noble dream that was the New Horizon mission!?”

  “Let her go.”   Halley’s friends obeyed and let her go again.  “Sadhika… we were both running away from something.  I know full well what the mission was really all about… you were running away from the emptiness of your lives, running away from the boredom of paradise, running away from an empty life left meaningless without struggle and challenge.  You created the mission just to alleviate your own petty existential boredom, and without a thought you condemned us to the void in the process.”

  “No.   No, you’re wrong Halley…  Maybe some of the crew were running away from any number of issues they may have had back on Earth, maybe Markus was running away from something Halley, but not us… and yes, it definitely turns out that we should have done a much better job of selecting the right crew to launch with… but we weren’t running away.  We mission principles were not running away Halley; we were vibrant, creative, and curious people.   I’ve never been bored a day in my life Halley, and neither have Wiremu, Neil, or In-Su.  There was always more to do, always more to learn, to discover… to experience!  We built this mission to create more opportunities for people to learn and to discover, not to just… not to just distract ourselves from boredom!  What a sad and narrow view you have of something so glorious…  

  “Dammit Halley, that’s never what this mission was all about, that was never what motivated us to put it together in the first place at all!  It was an eminently peaceful mission, we were a beloved part of the world we came from, an outstretching hand of Earth culture and civilization itself!  We stood on the shoulders of all of the giants who came before us and we reached out as far as we could on their behalf, and for everyone in our past who dreamed equally grand dreams but never had the means or technology to make it a reality!  And now it’s all coming apart, that glorious dream is evaporating… and all because of you, because of your childish and myopic pettiness.  You can’t see beyond what you are because you can’t even see past the bridge of your own fucking nose.  You’re a selfish coward.”

  This time it was Halley who rushed forward towards Sadhika like he wanted to kill her for what she’d said.  She happily raised her fists again in kind, ready to beat the shit out of him all over again, but this time it was Halley who Søren and Ishtar held back for his own good.

  “Fuck you!” Halley screamed as his friends held him back.

  “Oh, very mature,” Sadhika retorted, taunting him with an overdramatic eye roll as she planted her fists on her hips.  “And that goes for all of you too,” she said, surveying the crowd.  “You’re all children; you’re all spoiled little brats and selfish cowards.  It’s easy to run away Halley,” she continued, turning back to him now, as his friends released him on his promise that he’d be cool.   “It’s easy to justify doing whatever you already wanted to do in the first place, it’s so easy to go it alone, and then blame somebody else for what you ‘have’ to do,” she accentuated the word gesturally with air quotes.  “It’s so easy to provoke someone you want to kill anyways and then claim self-defence when you ‘have’ to kill them.”   Again she used air quotes to accentuate the word.  “But you know what’s not easy Halley?  You know what’s really fucking hard?”  

  She paused for dramatic effect, just long enough to sense them all leaning forward ever so slightly to hear what her answer was.  “Peace, Halley.  Peace, is very hard.  Peace takes a lot of work, peace means talk with people you hate; it means compromising with people you completely and fundamentally disagree with.  Peace, is so much harder, than war.   Peace, means the courage to take abuse without retaliation to gain the moral high ground over your aggressor and to avoid betraying what you believe in.   Your father understood that…” 

  Halley looked up at her, surprised.  “Didn’t he?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.  Instead he looked away.

  “You know what makes war and conflict so damned wasteful Halley?” she asked in a soft voice.  “The fact that it can never last forever.  Eventually there’s nothing left to fight with and peace inevitably breaks out again, and usually without anything ever really being resolved by the fighting.  War is just a break from peace, and can only ever end again with a return to peace, which makes every moment of war in between nothing but a terrible senseless waste.

  “And you know what Halley?  Peace isn’t just hard, it’s also the only way to actually change anything.  The courage to take abuse in order to gain and keep the moral high ground over your enemies is the only way to ever really change anything.  Violence only reinforces hate on both sides, only shame can really create changes in the behaviour and attitudes of your oppressors.  

  “Only peaceful cooperation or competition can ever really build anything of true value.  Hate and division… can only ever destroy; it can only ever destroy something like the dream that was the New Horizon’s mission.  You think Wii, Neil, In-Su and I agree about everything?  Hell no!  We’re very different people and we had very different ideas about critical aspects of this mission!  Wii, ironically enough, hated simulants and was mortified not only over having them on the ship at all, but especially over having one created of himself, but you see we all compromised.  We all got things we wanted and we all had to live with things we didn’t.  And you know what that got us?”  Again she hesitated for dramatic effect, to allow a moment for everyone to ponder what her answer might be. 

  “Here.” she stated simply.  Her point seemed to land as poignantly as she’d hoped it would.  “Here.” she said again more softly and more sincerely.   Everyone in the small crowd suddenly looked somehow uncomfortable, as though something they hadn’t wanted to see about themselves and what they’d done had suddenly been revealed to them against their will and exposed for everyone to see.  She’d succeeded in shaming all of them, all but one.  Halley just blinked.

  “We have to get ready.” he stated indifferently as he turned and headed for their much shorter road leading to their colony site.  Before he could get very far though, an alarm started sounding off from his wrist scroll.  He flicked it open and saw that it was the warning alarm he’d programmed to alert him via the mission network if there were any launches from the New Horizon.   He turned around and looked at the crowd he’d started away from, and then more deliberately at the simulated woman who’d attacked him.  “None of that matters anymore Sadhika,” he said.  “They’re coming.”  There was still much anger in his eyes, but it was now shaded with a not insignificant amount of fear as well.  “They just launched the landers… every single one of them.”HatH

   

   

  “Alright everyone, listen up.”  It was a few minutes later and Halley was laying out their defensive plan after consulting with Søren and Ishtar.  “As you know, we only have four shotguns and one laser rifle.”  As he addressed the group, they were all using their standard issue hunting knives to whittle spears out of appropriate sticks they’d found in the jungle.  

  “You two,” he said as he pointed to two of his people for whom Sadhika had never learned names, “you see that ridge over there just beyond the tree line?” he asked while pointing out the area he had in mind just adjacent to the airstrip, “I want you there with the laser rifle when they arrive, but for now just find a place nearby to wait.  They’ll be able to spot our positions with the satellites, so wait until the last moment to take up your final position so they can’t know exactly where you are when they actually get here.  Use the rifle’s multi-spectral scope to cover us as best you can from the elevated position.”   The two he’d been speaking to nodded their understanding.

  “Now,” Halley continued, “We have every reason to expect that they might be brash enough to land right here on the airstrip directly, but we can’t be sure.  They also might be foolish enough to attempt to come down right through the jungle canopy some ways away and try sneaking up on us.  Either way we can be sure that they know we know they’re coming.  They’ll all be armed, and with ten landers completely filled if they all survive the descent… they’ll outnumber us more than four to one.

  “Nyala, I want you to take a shotgun and take up a position inside the shuttle that’ll allow you shoot anyone who tries to come through the door, and then leave the hatch open.  The shuttle’s hull will prevent the satellites from seeing that you’re in there.

  “As for the rest of you, set your PANs to notify you after each pass of a satellite.   Once we know they’re nearby, reposition yourself after every pass so they can’t know exactly where any of you are when they actually attack.  Take up random positions about the perimeter of the airstrip where you can ambush them with your spears as they enter or exit the clearing, and try to get your hands on their weapons to use instead since we only have enough shotguns to hand out to a few of you.

  “People… I’m afraid this is all we got.  I put us at this disadvantage deliberately; I was hoping that it would avoid anything like this from ever happening at all, but… well here we are.  Are there any questions?”  Nobody spoke up.  “Does anyone have any suggestions?” he then asked.

  “Yeah,” Sadhika answered.  She was standing at the back of the crowd with her arms folded and with a sour expression on her face.  “Surrender.” she emphatically suggested.  “Completely,” she further elaborated.  “Call Asari and tell him that he wins, that they can have the shuttle back and that you’ll personally take responsibility for everything that’s happened here.  You could do that and avoid everything that’s about to happen.  You could save the lives of all of these people here who are about to die.”  

  Halley looked at her with a strange expression on his face.  He cocked his head to the side slightly as he blinked at her.  He didn’t understand.