Strong Against God

 

brought to you by my Patreons: OtiumOtiosum, Matt Zweig and Daniel H McGillivray

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Chapter One

I was a priest back then so I was pretty nervous about anyone watching me going into a brothel. Not that anyone would have stopped me of course, but they would have judged me and I could not give an explanation. For some reason I was even wearing a clerical shirt and collar identifying me as a priest. I just had to remind myself I was not doing anything wrong. I was serving Jesus, and I should never be ashamed of that, so I entered.

The receptionist looked at me but she didn’t said anything. I crossed the lobby and took out the piece of paper where I had written the information. They were waiting for me in room 22. I looked around, figured out how the rooms were arranged, and I found the room.

I stood there, feeling my heart racing, thinking it wasn’t too late to run away, but I found some courage and knocked on the door. It opened automatically.

There were four people spread over the room. They nearly seemed to be posing for an album cover. I didn’t know their names back then, but I know them now. Sagira was short and angry, she was leaning against a corner. Oakley was laying on the bed. She was throwing a ball in the air and catching it to pass the time. Khalfan, a muscular man, was standing there seeming half amused and half irritated, looking directly at me. Finally, in front of Khalfan, sitting on a chair directly opposite to the door, was Jun. He was a fit east asian man. He was looking directly at me, and in his sight I could see a threatening confidence.

I just stood there, frozen.

"Father Jacob!" Jun said, greeting me. "It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, please come in.”

I came in and the door closed automatically.

“It’s Jacobo actually. Like ‘hobbo’ but without the “h" and with a ‘hack' before it… ‘Jacob' will be fine.”

“Okay” Jun replied and laughed as if my shyness had charmed him. “You’ll forgive us if we don’t introduce ourselves, it’s part of the job.”

“Of course” I replied. “I forgive everyone, it’s part of my job.”

“By all means, take a seat” he said pointing at a chair next to the door. “So?, what’s the job father?”

”Father?” said Sagira, visibly confused.

“You are supposed to call christian priests ‘father'" Jun explained.

"You are making that up" claimed Oakley, finally ignoring her ball.

"It’s true" explained Kahlfan. "But female priests are called 'sister' not 'mother'"

"You are half right…" I replied, but Khalfan interrupted me.

"We don’r care" he said with the biggest smile I had seen on anyone’s face.

"…that’s fine… here’s the job: I need you to find a person on Earth"

Jun raised one eyebrow.

"That can be… quite challenging. Earth is a large lifeless place. I mean, it’s hard enough to find a person in a moon or a space station, and those are easier to survive and considerably smaller.“

"Don’t worry, I know where he is, getting to him is the problem"

"I see… and once we find this man… what should happen to him?”

"Nothing!, you should not hurt him!, we want to rescue him from Earth, this is a very important person. His name is Carlos Sanchez Lee, but he’s better known as Linus the Second, he is a priest… more than a priest in fact, have you ever heard of the Pope?”

"I have. He’s a sort of high ranking priest, right?, like a general in an army?"

"Yes, kinda, he’s the MOST high ranking priest in fact. He’s the representative of God on Earth.”

Oakley laughed out loud, very amused at the idea, then Sagira spoke.

"Isn’t the Pope supposed to be like… super old?"

"She’s right" intervened Khalfan. ”He might not be alive anymore.”

"In that case, I will pay you anyway" I promised.

"Now that you mention it" Jun said. ”Our contact assured us that you could pay. But how did you come to have so much money?"

"Well… mostly it was given to me by rich people, or even poor people, many were not even christian… I told them about my quest and why it was important, they believed in me… this man is very important, he will restore the church…" Jun raised a hand and lowered has face. He was asking me to stop.

"We don’t question our clients’ motivations, and we prefer not to know them. We will find this man for you, just tell us where to find him.”

My heart was racing once more, this was it, the moment of truth.

"There’s one more thing… this has been a deal breaker with other mercenary companies…"

"Prolapse it out" Khalfan ordered me.

"I need to go with you.”

"Not possible" Khalfan replied immediately. ”We can’t do business with you.”

They all stood up ready to leave; except Jun, he raised one hand, and they stopped.

"Why?" Jun asked.

"It’s hard to explain to people who are not christian but… blessings are important."

"Blessings?" asked Khalfan, smiling again.

"Yes" I explained. ”When you become a priest you receive a sacred blessing that gives you divine authority, like the authority to appoint other priests. The priest who blessed you received his blessing from another priest, and he from another… all the way back thousands of years into the past until you reach Jesus blessing the twelve apostles and ordering them to go around the world promoting the good news… So you see, it is a blessing that comes from God himself.”

"So?"

"Well… if you find Linus the Second, and he is dying, or he cannot get to space for some reason, we would need someone to be blessed with his divine authority, so that it is not lost, and the church can have a leader to rebuild it until a new College of Cardinals can be established and a new Pope can be elected.”

Sagira laughed.

"And that someone would be you?" she said.

"Yes"

"How convenient" she replied. Without taking his eyes off me Jun scolded her.

"We don’t question our clients’ motivations Sagira…” Then his attitude changed as he talked to me again. ”Father Jacob…"

"I know, I know 'there's not place for tourists here', don’t worry, I’ll stay out of your way"

“No"

The four mercenaries again stood up and walked towards the door.

"I will pay you twice you fee!" I said, desperate.

"I would love that" Jun admitted. “But we can’t do business.”

He was about to touch the door.

"I can be useful!”

Jun stopped and turned back to see me.

"I don’t wish to insult you father but… what abilities could you have that would be useful in our line of work?”

"I can fight.”

"Everyone can fight.”

"Before I was a priest… I can fight hand to hand combat… and I am really good at it.”

I felt someone looking at me. I turned to see, it was Oakley.

"Let’s see” she said.

Jun, Khalfan and Sagira moved to one corner of the room, Oakley stood on one side, and I stood on the other. Oakley pulled out a knife, first with the point up and then doing one quick single handed movement to turn the point down.

Khalfan reached for his own knife to give it to me. As annoying as he was, he believed in fair fights.

"No thanks" I said to him. “This serves to prove my point.”

Khalfan was gladly surprised by this development. He put away his knife.

And the fight started. Oakley moved quickly towards me trying to stab me, but I easily dodged her and punched her in the mouth. She began bleeding from her lower lip. I could see the respect in her eyes.

Then she tried a bunch of different attacks in quick succession. She stabbed, slashed, switched hands… but I stopped, dodged, and countered her attacks constantly.

My mind was not on that fight. My mind was on one of those days of my childhood spent in the pit, surrounded by vague figures. Were they cheering?, screaming?, I couldn’t tell. Another kid tried to stab me in the stomach, I intercepted their hand and held it firmly…

… just as I did with Oakley when she tried the same thing. Then I tried bending her arms towards her, stab her with her own knife.

But instead she let go of the knife and grabbed it in the air with her other hand just to immediately try a slashing motion towards my neck. I used my foot to move one of her feet and make her loose balance. She fell but she succeeded in slashing my upper left leg, forcing me to move back and allowing her to get back on her feet.

Then Oakley again advanced towards me, trying a lot of quick attacks, but I blocked or dodged most of them. Although I did get a few cuts in my arms. She was doing a lot of erratic twitching motions. She hoped to make me react in one direction and attack in another, but I didn’t fall for it. She had me against the wall, I couldn't dodge or avoid her attacks any longer, she again tried stabbing me and I stopped her hand and then I stopped the other so she couldn’t use the same trick as last time, it was matter of strength now, and it was clear to everyone I was strong.

"Enough" Jun declared but Oakley and I kept struggling, “enough!”

“Not unless you agree I’m strong to go with you!,” I screamed.

“You are,” Jun agreed and finally Oakley and I let go. ”You know what you are doing Father Jacob but, is that all you can do?. Any fire arm experience?, military training?"

"No, this is all I know. I learned as a child because…”

Khalfan interrupted me.

"No need. You don’t have to tell us how you know what you know.”

"Thanks, I didn’t want to.

Oakley was opening and closing her hand, I had bruised her wrist.

"None of us wants to" she reassured me.

"Was that enough to convince you?" I asked Jun. ”I’ll still pay you double.”

“No."

“Triple?"

Leaving the brothel was just as embarrassing as entering it, even if the receptionist was the only one there to see me. I tried to ignore her and I hoped she would ignore me too, but she saw where my leg was bleeding and she smiled.

"Had a good time, didn’t you father?"

I stopped for a second. I opened my mouth to say something, but thought better of it and decided to just walk away.

"We hope to have you back!" she said laughing at her own dumb joke, but then she realized something important and her attitude changed. ”Hey!, for real, wait.”

I sighed.

"Yes?"

"Could I have your contact?"

"I am not interested…"

"Jesus was friends with many prostitutes" she reminded me.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, my leg hurt, my jeans were getting soaked in blood near the wound, and she was right.

"Sure… just… please don’t… just use it seriously, okay?”

"Sure sure, only serious things" she said in a mocking tone of voice.

I was sure nothing good would come out of this, but I took out my cellphone, navigated the menus, and she showed me her cellphone with the notification “New contact received”.

I walked out of the brothel into a dark alley, but looking up I could see lights, buildings and streets… It occurs to me that many of you have probably never been in a space station, I’ll explain. Most space stations are huge cylinders. This one, Astoreth Station, was around 10 kilometers long and 2.5 kilometers in diameter, spinning to simulate gravity so that “up" points towards the center of the cylinder and “down" points towards the walls of the cylinder. The city was built inside the cylinder and for that reason it looped over you, and when you looked up you only saw buildings and streets, or maybe parks, and of course the Spine of the station. This is a long rod, extremely strong, going through the center of the cylinder and connected to it by a few equally strong columns people call Ribs. The spine is not only used for structural support, it also carries all the services and utilities like water, electricity and air filtration, but more importantly it was covered in long light producing strips; otherwise the station would be completely dark. In that moment the lights were fairly dim because the intensity of the light is modulated to simulate day and night, but in a 26 hour cycle instead of 24, I’m not sure why. 

To be honest I was double guessing myself thinking of the deal I had proposed to the mercenaries. They told me they would think about it, but part of me was scared, hoping they would not accept. I was so lost in my thoughts I did not see the man and the woman playing chess on the sidewalk. I was just barely aware they were using a bunch of crates and boxes as improvised tables and chairs, but they certainly noticed me. Then I saw a beaten down vending machine boasting of being able to print “50k different items”. I decided to take a look at its catalogue and after a short while I decided to print myself a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I had not smoked in years, but I thought it would help me calm down.

Only then I noticed the two people looking away form their game and paying a lot of attention to my cigarettes being printed. I didn’t think much about it and picked them up when they were done. Turns out they had paper covering both ends of the cigarette. That’s what I get from using a cheap vending machine, but no problem, I ripped the paper from both ends. At that point the people playing chess stood up. I grabbed my lighter and turned on my cigarette.

"It’s illegal to smoke here, go to your ship" the woman told me very angry

"Illegal?" I asked her, amused. "This is a pirate base, everything here is illegal.”

"You are polluting everyone’s air!" the man screamed at me. "This aint no fancy ship whose filter you can fuck up. Stop smoking.”

I reluctantly and growlingly turned out my cigarette without even using it once.

"Fine" I conceded.

I was very stressed. I had just had a very difficult day, and now my one relief had been denied from me. Not a good mood to make decisions in.

"You have to follow the laws of Astoreth Station while you are here" the man said, threateningly.

"Laws?" I questioned them. “Everyone here is a pirate or a mercenary. We are all criminals, what’s one cigarette?”

"Too much" the woman sentenced.

"Fuck you" I whispered.

"Now you are too much" the man replied.

The woman tried to hit me in the crotch, but I moved back to avoid her knee and instead punched her in the face so fast she had no time to react. The man drew his arm back for one strong punch, probably hoping to knock me out, but I was already using my foot as a hook to to lift one of his feet and make him fall on his back.

The woman grabbed their board, knocking all the pieces to the ground, and she was about to hit me with it…

"Hit him!" Khalfan cheered with that huge smile on his face.

"Do not hit him" Oakley replied, not amused by Khalfan’s joke.

"He was smoking!" the woman complained.

"He’s an idiot" Khalfan assured them.

"Leave him with us" Oakley asked diplomatically, and they seemed to agree.

The woman started picking up their pieces but the man turned to me one last time.

"May you learn the importance of the law.”

That was my first blessing in this quest.

The pirates sat back to start a new game, and we three walked away.

"I thought your religion was all about letting people hurt you or something like that" Khalfan commented.

"It’s all about love…" I explained, and thought to myself: "What could people like you understand about love anyway?”. Then I continued to explain, "but I am a flawed human and I lost my temper… so it’s a good thing it’s all about forgiveness too.”

"The station laws are not about forgiveness though" Oakley warned me. "So better not break them maybe?"

"What’s all this about laws?" I was exasperated. "This is a pirate base, right?. We are all breaking the law simply by being here."

"According to some laws that are imposed on people, sure" Khalfan agreed. "But not according to our laws, the ones we all agreed to.”

I was very confused, and Oakley must have noticed it, so she explained.

"Astoreth used to be a station like the others. Then when the supply ships just stopped one day, back when Earth got messed up, people here needed water, food, and raw materials, so they offered pirates a place to dock and make repairs in exchange for those things. But when you invite pirates, mercenaries, and other "violent people" things can get volatile. The only way to keep this arrangement is if we all agree to follow certain rules, certain laws. Sure, they are not the laws of the moon colonies, orbital cities nor merchant corporations, but they are the laws we set for ourselves. This place actually has a constitution."

"Really?, what does it say?"

"I just read it once, but the usual. Do not kill anyone in the station, do not damage the station, do not fuck anyone for free, don’t smoke in public air… common decency.”

"Who enforces those rules?"

"We get together every so often to vote for the mayor.”

"That’s very impressive" I admitted. "In my experience with… violent people… there’s someone who makes all the rules gives all the orders and people obey, no matter what…"

Khalfan let out a booming laughter.

"And does that criminal organization still exists?"

“No."

“Exactly."

Then we stopped in front of a restaurant.

"Finally" Khalfan exclaimed

"Well, thanks for helping me, my hotel is farther down that way.”

Oakley grabbed my wrist, in a friendly manner this time.

"Yeah but we thought we’d invite you to eat something. It got kinda intense with the knife back there… but it was purely professional. I want you to feel welcomed with us.”

She wanted me to feel welcome?, these people who had been clearly following me since I left our meeting?, these people who would kill or save anyone for the right amount of money?… but I had follow Jesus’ example.

"Ummmm, yeah, sure, thank you both.”

"I don’t care how you feel" Khalfan clarified, at least he was honest. "I’m just here because I’m the medic of the team and I have to take a look at that leg. That’s the law in our team.”

"Thanks anyway.”

We entered the restaurant. It was late so it was more of a pub at that hour, populated by lone criminals drinking alone, and they seemed annoyed by our intrusion.

We sat at a table and it lit up with the menu, but I had to clean the table of scraps and dust to be able to read it. Khalfan selected something almost without looking, like he knew the menu by heart, while Oakley read everything carefully and with anticipation. I read a little and found something that caught my eye.

"What’s a… hui-huit-la..?"

"Huitlacoche?, a kind of mushroom" Oakley explained. "It is DELICIOUS.”

"Okay… I’ll have that.”

"Leg" Khalfan ordered.

I extended my leg so that Khalfan could check it. He took a pair of scissors from somewhere in his clothes and used them to make the cut in my pants a little longer so he could see the wound better and start cleaning it.

"So…" Oakley said "you mentioned the money was granted to you by wealthy donors… how did that happen?, did they contact you?"

"Well… it’s a long story.”

Khalfan put aside his scissors and pulled a bottle of disinfectant from a pocket in his jacket.

"We are just trying to find out if you are someone else’s middleman.”

"Come on man!" Oakley complained. "I was getting there, if you don’t like how I do things do it yourself.”

Khalfan smiled.

"I just did" he sprayed disinfectant on my wound. "So… who’s your boss?, we will still do the job, we are just curious.”

"Oh, Jun accepted?, great… No one’s my boss. The money was just a donation. Believe it or not there are still many catholics around the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and some of them are rich. Some of the people who gave me the money aren’t even christian. They just wanted to help a good cause… a few people over at Jabru were actually buddhists or shintoists but they just… respected my quest, you know?. I just told them what I wanted to do and why it was important and they trusted me.”

"Religion is a good a business" Khalfan said and began stitching my leg.

I sighed.

"Some use it that way, not gonna lie… mutherfucker!”

My leg hurt 10 times more for just an instant.

"Hit a nerve, sorry" Khalfan pleaded with a half hidden smile. It was obvious he did it on purpose.

"…but I am honest. I won’t keep a single cent of the money. I’ll spend it all trying to restore the church, and if I have money remaining afterwards, I’ll donate it to charities.”

"Hmmm…" Oakley pondered, looking deeply into me. “What do you say Khalfan?, can we believe him?"

"If nothing else, he seems honest.”

I thought to myself: ”At least they appreciate honesty.”

"Well, if you are gonna be part of the team, you need to know our names… or the names we use anyway. My name is Oakley. As you have seen, I am the close combat specialist. This grumpy man over here goes by Khalfan.”

"That’s not my real name.”

"He’s the medic, but he's also got a lot of experience fighting in a certain revolution…”

"Oakley!" he screamed, for once not smiling. “We don’t say how we know what we know!”

"There have been a bunch of revolutions all over the moons, it doesn’t narrow it down.”

"Still, don’t say more about me.”

"I won’t, because now I have to talk about our leader, Jun. He does all the bossing around but also he’s an excellent sniper, of people and ships. He can take down a two person shuttle from orbit with a single shot. And finally Sagira is our ship captain and mechanic. She makes sure to protect us from the vacuum outside."

"And now me" I announced. "I am good at not loosing a fight."

"Kinda…" Oakley replied.

Finally our food arrived. It didn’t look that good, but when I tasted it I immediately remembered to give thanks to God because it was the best food I had had in months. Khalfan got his to take away because the whole time he kept working on my leg and the other cuts I had in my arms. He was clearly a good doctor, it was a waste he didn’t work at a hospital.

Chapter two

Oakley explained to me they would need two days to stock their ship and get it ready for departure, but she told me where in the port I should meet them in three days so we could depart.

In those three days I visited many places around the station: old houses, government buildings, parks, hospitals… their particular styles confessed they had been built by the United Nations in a happier time, when immigrants from all over Earth populated stations like this, building a great system of prosperity for humankind…

And yet I could see the bullet holes in their facades, fissures in their walls, warning signs that some buildings were unstable, and of course, those buildings were abandoned and in ruins; but many other perfectly stable buildings were empty too, like one school I entered. The windows were broken, the desks had been stolen or moved away long ago, there was mold growing in the corners… and yet there was no obvious reason for it to be empty… except, perhaps, for the lack of children. The population of this city had once been much larger than it was now.

Although surprisingly there were still a few schools here. I saw the parents picking up their children as if they were normal families, and I wondered what would those kids grow up to be in a place like this. In the whole city I could not find a single working temple of any religion, although there were several in ruins.

Finally I decided to visit the market, the place that kept Astoreth alive, and indeed, while the rest of the city had sparse people coming and going, the market was packed.

It was a large open circular area where crews and merchants were arranged in concentrical rings where each group was given a certain area in the floor to display their merchandise. The outer ring was solely for metal scraps. Engines, life support systems, thorium cores, ion thrusters, cabins… you could probably assemble a an entire ship using only things you found in this market.  

"Interested in radiation shields hopper?" a youthful woman said to me when I stepped too close to her merchandise. “Take a look at our catalogue…"

"No thanks.”

"…we have an entire warehouse in FuckAIs street,” then she whispered “that’s where we keep the good stuff, undamaged, never used in battle. You could sail through Saturn’s Hexagon with them.”

I looked at her merchandise. One of the shields had been pierced, probably by a coilgun projectile, and even from afar I could tell the metal around the impact had melted and cooled again only recently. Whomever they took it from didn’t give it up willingly, and it would need a lot of repairs anyway.

"Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind…”

The next ring was full of medical stuff, deoncologizers, organ printers, aspirin… and they had the good stuff too, the ones the Martian Worker Coops have in their ships, probably stolen from those same ships. But mostly it was just recreational drugs, like those fuel crystals that seriously fuck you up.

The next few rings didn’t have a theme but rather it was based on whatever they had stolen recently. For example someone must have raided a mining station because I saw a bunch of people selling unrefined platinum ore. The next one suggested someone must have raided a greenhouse shipping because they were selling a lot of live dirt and other gardening supplies.

I don’t remember very well what was in the other rings, I wasn’t keeping notes, but I do remember that the last few rings were all about food. Probably harvests they had stolen from shippings or small greenhouse stations, but probably a good amount had been grown in Astoreth… using stolen supplies… but at the very center of the ring was the food court. There were many tables and chairs surrounded by carts each selling one specific thing. One cart only sold one kind of soup, another only sold one kind of rice, another only sold one kind of beverages. You were not supposed to go to one cart and buy your meal, but rather you would assemble your meal form the stuff you bought at several carts. You could even scream at them form your table, ask for something, and they would bring it and charge you.

And I had to admit it, that food was delicious. Those people only sold one thing, but they had learned to make that one thing to utter perfection. If I could go back there it would be mostly for the food to be honest.

I got myself a mexican torta and jamaice water and sat down to eat at an empty table, ready to thoroughly enjoy my meal.

Then someone said:

"Food is the one redeeming quality of these people, don’t you think?”

I looked up, she was a tall woman, she looked strong, like if she grew up in Venus or even Earth, and she might have because she was considerably older than me, perhaps fifty or sixty, but she didn’t look old, you know what I mean?. She looked like a young person who has lived a long time.

"It’s certainly one of them" I admitted.

"Can I sit?" she asked, and only then I noticed she was holding a bowl of noodles

“Sure."

We started eating. I was unsure if she wanted to have a conversation, so I waited for her to talk.

"Forgive me if I’m wrong, but your clothes… you are a christian priest, right?"

"Yes I am.”

"What brings you to Astoreth station?… wait, let me guess… you went to the worse place you could think of, a wretched den of sin and crime, because this is the place that needs Jesus the most, right?, like the guy who went to Padua?”

"Wow, you give me a huge compliment comparing me to Saint Anthony, and you do have a point, Astoreth needs Jesus, but my mission is different…"

"And you won’t tell me what it is?"

"I am trying to restore the church by finding our leader, the Pope, if he is still alive…"

"Huh, interesting, well… I am not christian, my father was Serer and my mother was Zoroastrian, so I ended up with a weird combination of their beliefs… but… I think I get you. Humanity is in dire need of leadership, so I hope you find your leader.”

"Thanks, and what are you doing here?, you don’t seem to be from around here either.”

"You are a good observer, or perhaps I’m just that transparent, but you are right, I have my own mission… I’m searching for ten good people in this station to convince god not to turn it into salt.”

I laughed, she was making reference to an old story form the Bible.

"You know a lot about christianity to not be christian.”

"I went through a religious crisis when I was a little younger than you are now, I started learning about many religions, searching for the true truth… but that was before… well, you know… you must have been, what?, eight?"

"I was seven when it got to us.”

"Yeah, my religious crisis didn’t seem that important when the whole civilization was in crisis…"

"Hey!, you are good, I see what you did there, you changed the subject… You can just say you don’t want to talk about your mission, I won’t insist.”

"Thank you.”

"And what’s your name?"

"Enasir, and you?”

"Jacobo, but everyone calls me Jacob.”

"Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you Jacob.”

"I say the same, Enasir."

We finished our meals, we talked some more, exchanged contacts, and we even played Uno. I lost, but it was so much fun. When she left I wished we could see each other soon, and sadly, my wish would come true.

For those of you who’ve never been to an orbital city, the port is really is easy to find. People live in the walls of the cylinder, but the flat sides are used as ports. There are hundreds of spaces for ships of different classes arranged in concentrical rings, although in Astoreth there were only a couple dozen of ships docked at any time. Each ring has an industrial catwalk and there are six elevators that take people to the ring where their ships are. Other ports have huge cranes loading and unloading cargo all the time,and Astoreth had them too, but they were much less active.

The main risk, and it has happened to me twice, is that you get mixed up with which port you are supposed to go. If you go to the wrong one you have to travel the entire length of the station to go to the other one, which can seriously delay your trip if you miss your launching window, but luckily that didn’t happen to me this time.

Arriving or even getting close to the port is always weird, at least for me, suddenly you don’t feel like you are in a open space anymore, but rather this giant omnipresent wall reminds you that you are, and always were, inside.

I rode the elevator to the ring with our ship. It was pretty high, which was fortunate for me, the higher you go the slower you spin and the weaker gravity you feel, so it became much easier to carry my luggage.

I saw them along the catwalk, loading the ship. At this height you can really feel how you are walking in a giant circle. You get the illusion that the ceiling and the ground are spinning bellow you while you stay in place, like a giant conveyor belt.

"Is this everything we need for the trip to Earth?” I inquired when we loaded the last few crates.

"We are not going to Earth just yet" Jun explained. "We need to get a couple of important things first… one important thing actually.”

"What thing?"

"The return pod” Sagira explained. “Any idiot can land on Earth, rocks do it as a matter of fact. The hard part is getting back up. Usually, you do that with the help of a space port, like the ones they’ve got on Mars… but the ones they’ve got on Earth are… in rough shape. So we need the return pod. It’s a small ship whose only function is to land and get back up.”

"I think I’ve heard of them…" I thought out loud. "But aren’t they just for landing in asteroids though"

"They were" Sagira explained. "But a few people have created pods capable of dealing with the gravity of Eart. Necessity breeds invention, not that you would know anything about breeding.”

I ignored her dumb joke and sighed in resignation.

"Add it to the check then" I said.

Everyone laughed, specially Khalfan with that booming laugh of his.

"Jacob, my boy!" Jun put one arm around me. "Those are military technology. When one of those enters the black market it’s like christmas, but that hasn’t happened in a while, so we are gonna have to acquire one through other means.”

"Is stealing gonna be a problem with you?" Sagira asked.

"We are doing this to save a life. It’s not ideal, but under the circumstances it is permissible.”

"Holly shit, I was joking…”

I helped them get the crates into the ship. CLANK. CLANK. Someone was coming through the catwalk. I looked back and recognized the receptionist from the brothel, along with a man, and a baby.

"I told you there was a priest in the station!" she clamored.

The man looked at me in shock.

"Jesus Christ!, it’s true!… I had not seen a priest in… in decades!, since I was a child!"

"If we get a couple more we could open a zoo" Khalfan said, only half joking, and Jun hit him in the ribs so he’d shut up.

"I am leaving though" I warned him. ”So perhaps you should take a picture.”

“Maybe," he didn’t realize I was joking too "but first, could you please baptize my son?"

"Baptize your son?, do you know what that means?"

"I do!, I'm a christian… I mean, I haven’t been to mass since forever but that’s because…"

"Yeah…"

"You know… anyway, I’d still love for my son to be baptized, but only priests can do it.”

"Okay, sure, I will baptize your son… but just so you know, in special circumstances anyone can baptize, and these are special times.”

"Anyone can baptize?, I had no idea… thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.”

I could not believe that in this sad meeting place for criminals there was still one good man, but I told to myself that even Abraham found good people in Sodom and Gomorrah. I just hoped this little ember of faith could hang on until I was back to restore the church. How wrong I was.

I looked for a bottle of water among our provisions. I walked towards the man and he uncovered the baby’s head, so I let a little water fall on his head.

"Now I baptize you in the name of the father, the son, and the holly spirit, amen."

That was the first ritual I performed during this quest.

I could hear Khalfan whispering jokes about the ritual to Oakley while the receptionist and her friend left, but I just ignored them.

Then we finally boarded the ship. It was cozy. Instead of the surfaces of exposed metal I had grown used to in old ships it had walls covered in a nice smooth resin with a reddish color. The floor was covered in some kind of smooth white ceramic. The seats were made of black synthethic leather and they seemed new. Nothing in the ship seemed improvised or like it had been fixed a hundred times, and yet, it must have. I could tell because it had windows, real windows and not just screens.

Back when people began exploring space they all wanted to sit next to the windows and see their planet go away and become smaller. They all wanted to see Mars or the Moon becoming bigger as they arrived. They all wanted to see the wonders of space and all the new places they would explore… but then the real exploration started. Long journeys through the void of space to find asteroids, to reach the small moons of the gas giants, to arrive to lonely space stations far from everything. 

In those journeys there’s not much to see but the vacuum of space, so eventually people made without windows in their ships, but this one had them. It must have been repaired a hundred times with the pieces of a hundred different ships, like a modern day ship of Theseus, and yet it felt new, like the most advanced ship you could buy from the fanciest shipyard in Ceres.

But I couldn’t move, it was happening, there was no turning back. The insecurities I had been pushing down finally broke the dam in my soul and flooded my mind.

I believed in my quest, of course, but I was hiring mercenaries, criminals, to help me restore the church… Perhaps in a thousand years, when people looked back, they would see me as one of the many regrets and shames of the church, like Pope John XII… but if I succeeded the church would judge me, a church lead by good people, like Pope John XXIII… My reputation was irrelevant. I just had to… tolerate these criminals, and use their loose morals like tools for good. I would not turn back.

We all took our places and the safety belts automatically wrapped around us, then Sagira spoke to the control tower.

"Joke to Astoreth Station, ready to undock for take off, over.”

"Here Astoreth Station, you are cleared for take off, may we never meet again."

"May we never meet again.”

The ship shook and began moving on a system of rails towards the wall of the station where a hexagonal door had opened. The ship entered there and the doors closed behind us, leaving us on that dark compartment. Soon we heard the hiss of the air being sucked away. It took a while, but when it was finally unpresurized another set of hexagonal doors opened, revealing nothing but the vacuum of space. Then a mechanical arm got hold of the ship and moved it away, like holding it over a cliff, and it released us.

Suddenly we were falling, the same acceleration that had been pushing us against the ground kept acting on us, but now there was no floor to stop our fall. I could see through the windows in front the kilometers of station passing by extremely quickly, like in one of those dreams where you fall form a tall place, until we passed the last bit of the station, and we kept falling, but there was nothing to stop our fall. We were finally floating. 

"Okay guys" Sagira announced. "It’s gonna take me a while to position the ship until we can start accelerating towards our destination, until then you can move around.”

As I took off my seatbelt I remembered how nice it is to float. Perhaps the nomads were right and gravity was a mistake. Bu then I saw it, a small toy floating above the dashboard: a jousting knight.

If you have never been in zero G you may not know this (when I’ve told this story before some people didn’t believe me) but when you spin something in space, and that thing is unbalanced, it will flip backwards and forwards extremely quickly as it spins. This is called the Dzhanibekov’s effect.

This was a toy whose front was shaped like a medieval knight with a horse and a jousting lance, but the back was like a cone with an opening for a screw. You could screw it in and then with one quick motion of your hand make it spin. It would get unscrewed and then it would flip, the lance would be pointing backwards, just to flip again a second later, the lance pointing forwards again, and the process would repeat over and over, very quickly, and if you pushed it forwards it would continue to spin and flip as it flew through the air.

The idea was that you and a friend would each send their knights flying towards each other, the knights would joust, and one would send the other flying away. That would be the winner… or you could just spin them in place and watch them flip. That was often entertaining enough for me.

I had not seen any other instance of that toy, ever since I left mine behind that desperate day… but here there was another one, in pristine conditions, proof that I had not imagined it all, proof that there had been other children who played with them.

"That’s mine, don’t touch it" Segira warned me. She grabbed it and placed it back with the other toys that adorned her dashboard, screwing it in a sort of base so it wouldn’t fly away again. Making sure to screw it properly this time.

"I used to have a bunch just like this one.”

“Hm."

"Were did you get it?”

"I don’t know, they were popular on Pallas when I was a child…”

Of course she didn’t want to talk about it. Then Khalfan floated towards me and stopped one milimiter from my face by grabbing one of the hand rails above.

"Welcome to The Joke, Sagira over there is the captain. What she is too nice to say is that inside this ship her word is LAW, even above Jun. If she tells you to do something, yo do it. If she orders you to fart you fart that instant, if she orders you to rip your nails and eat them you do it that very second, and then, only if she’s not busy with something else, you may ask her why, understood?”

"Sure Kahlfan. I’ve been inside ships before. The captain is king or queen, just one question Sagira, why is it called The Joke?”

"Because my father laughed when I said I would one day fix this ship.”

"An interesting story we have no time for today" Jun interrupted. “You can fight well father Jacob, but we will need more form you. Khalfan, Oakley and I will take turns teaching you so that you may be useful for this mission.”

Oakley smiled hatching her devious plan.

“Shotgun.”

I shivered.

"Can we practice with fake knives this time?

"Sure, and if you still get hurt Khalfan can teach you to patch yourself up.”

Then Khalfan laughed with his BOOMING laughter.

"And I do LOVE teaching.”

Spaceships are divided into floors, kinda like a tall house. The floor above the storage room is often called the Common Room and it can serve many purposes. Oakley and I had fashioned it into a training room, which mostly just meant it had no furniture and we put a carpet on the floor.

We went to change into sport clothes while we waited for the ship to start accelerating so that we could have gravity again. When I came back Oakley was stretching.

“Ready?"

We began practicing, but it wasn’t an intense fight like before. I would try a few movements with the rubber knife and Oakley would stop me to give me suggestions. She would propose hypothetical combat positions and we would explore how to best react in each case. I don’t remember what I did in one of those situations, but I remember she found it amusing and she was laughing.

"Okay, sure, that would work, but now let’s do a worst case scenario. Get on the floor…" I laid down face up. "What would you do if you were down like this and I did… this!”

She jumped on me holding the rubber knife as if to stab me. I held her hand with the knife. I was breathing heavily. I punched Oakley in the face with more strength than I had deployed in more than a decade.

Oakley backed away, swaying. She would have fallen but her hand found the wall on time. She was bleeding form her nose. I wanted to apologize but I couldn’t speak, I could hardly breathe.

"Yeah, that’d work" Oakley admitted while looking at how the blood pooled on her hand.

She rubbed her hand on her clothes, soiling them with blood, and came back to help me.

"Easy, easy, it’s fine, everything’s fine" she said.

"I… remembered one time when I used to… play with knives… oh god" I was shaking.

"What happened?”

I whispered, I couldn’t say it aloud.

"I killed him… they… congratulated me…”

"Fuckers. Well, I think it’s fair to say you turned your life around… Now, get on the floor again. We cannot have you having panic attacks on a mission. It’s okay if you cry or you freeze or whatever, just… don’t hit me like that again, I only have so many teeth.”

We continued practicing the same scenario over and over until Khalfan came in and saw me as a mess of tears and snot, while Oakley has blood stains and a huge bruise bellow her left eye.

"This is why we: DON’T ASK HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW!"

Oakley laughed.

"Kinda unavoidable sometimes Khalfan. He had a trigger situation and this is the only way I know how to deal with that.”

"He should hire a psychiatrist, not make you waste your time.”

"He has a point, you know?" she told me.

"I’ll get one when this is over, I promise” and I did.

Then we heard Jun screaming form the kitchen.

"Dinner’s ready!”

"Dinner?" I asked.

"A kind of meal" Khalfan replied.

I stood up and followed them into the kitchen.

Chapter 3

Jun was happily cooking, wearing an apron and even a chef’s hat. I remember he was cooking sour chicken with a lot of red sauce and rice. This is a very typical meal at a spaceship because it’s a meal that sticks together and to the plate, which is useful in low gravity environments so your food doesn’t float away. 

Jun came to me and gave me a full plate of rice and chicken.

"Thanks" I said and turned back to go to my room, but Sagira was coming through the door just as I was going out.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Come eat with us father" Jun invited me.

"It’s an order" Sagira clarified.

The five of us sat down to eat. Khalfan started the conversation.

"Guys, guess what I found!. Remember that guy whose hands we cut off?, I've still got them!, they were on a jar in the infirmary.”

Jun sighed.

"Khalfan, what’s our guest gonna think?”

"That we cut off hands!" he laughed.

"He was holding a detonator" Sagira intervened. “One of those detonators that explode if you let go, so we had to neutralize that threat.”

"Guys!" Jun nearly screamed. “Can we talk about something else?, please?”

Awkward silence. This was exactly why I didn’t want to share a meal with people like them. I could only feel pity for them, and hope they would repent of their sins one day. Until then our relationship had to be merely professional… then I saw Oakley, bruised, chewing slowly because it probably hurt her…

"Do… you guys like board games?" I ventured.

More silence, but this wasn’t awkward silence, this was terrified silence. Jun was intrigued.

"What kind of board games?”

"Classics. Uno, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Parchis…"

"Those are all good but, do you know what I really like?"

Khalfan smile had vanished.

"Oh no.”

"I like those board games that are complex, with lots of pieces and rules, do you like those?"

"Catan?"

"More complex than that.”

"Risk?, Hero Quest?”

Jun shook his head, and slowly said:

"Have you ever heard of…”

Khalfan seemed to almost be in pain.

"Why why why…”

Jun smiled with a mischievous plan.

"War of the Ring?”

Oakley smashed her chopsticks on the table. Sagira sighed an looked at the roof, wishing she was somewhere else. Khalfan buried his face in his hands in frustration. I was utterly lost.

"I know War of the Ring" I confessed.

Everyone muttered words of complaint.

"We are doomed Oakley" Sagira said.

"We’ll get through this captain" she replied, almost laughing.

"…but I’ve never played it" I added.

"How come?" Jun inquired.

"It’s gonna sound super weird but… I like reading rule books for board games, even if I have never played them. Sometimes I enjoy that more than the actual game, I don’t know why. I’m weird… so yeah, I’ve read the rules for War of the Ring.”

"Do you wanna play?”

“NO!," Khalfan begged me "don’t do it, please!"

"What’s going on?”

Jun was happy to explain.

"You see, once we start we can’t stop, you can eat, go to the bathroom… but you can’t sleep, you can’t do any other task, the game must be finished.”

"Doesn’t it take like four hours?”

“Exactly."

"I mean… we have like 30 hours until we reach the next station, right?"

"It’s agreed then" Jun declared, and honestly, when he said that I shivered a little.

"No!" Khalfan lamented. “I’m not doing this again!, I’m not playing in your team Jun!”

"I’ll do it" Sagira said with a mix of resignation and excitement.

"WHY!?" Khalfan demanded to know.

"It’s gonna be fun, the kind of fun, the kind of fun you are glad you did but you don’t wanna repeat for a while.”

Oakley sighed.

"Well Sagira, I guess… if you wanna play, then I could play too, we could play the four player version.”

"You are all MAD!" Khalfan accused us. "This job is just beginning and you wanna torture yourselves with an impossible game. You are all bad in the head and I am not that kinda doctor, so: screw. all. of. you.”

Somehow, he was laughing again by the end.

We ate and we talked some more. Afterwards Jun brought an old box held together by many layers of tape and opened it to reveal the board and all the pieces perfectly organized. The underside of the board was glued to that kind of black plastic that is somehow also magnetic, the kind they use in fridge magnets, and every piece had been carefully fitted with its own little circle of that magnetic material in its base. If we stopped accelerating the pieces would not float away.

We laid the board on the table, it barely fitted, and then we started setting everything up. It should have taken a long time, but Jun had memorized where everything went, which was crazy because that board has hundreds of sections with very weird names, but he knew exactly where each of them was.

We rolled dice to divide into teams and factions. Oakley and I would play with the Shadow Armies, while Jun and Sagira would play with the Free People’s Armies.

This is an asymmetric game, and it is one of the most complex games I’ve ever played, but the basic idea is very simple. The Free People can win if the Ring Bearer makes it to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring without being corrupted, while the Shadow Armies can win by taking a certain number of fortresses and cities or by corrupting the Ring Bearer.

The developers probably intended for the Free People player to move the Fellowship as a whole, so that they can withstand the corruption. Instead Sagira had the idea of splitting them up and making them leaders in many different fortresses. Also, instead of moving the Ring Bearer directly to Mordor Jun  would only use it to activate all the nations and have access to their armies.

As a result, after an hour and a half of this Oakley and I realized we were fucked. Our huge armies were sieging like three fortresses at the same time, but we couldn’t take them because the bonuses of the members of the Fellowship were just enough to stop us. And sure, or armies regenerated and theirs didn’t, but they had numeric advantage because all their troops were together while ours were doing the long trip back from Mordor to wherever they were needed.

"We need to change our strategy" Oakley told me during a snack break.

"Perhaps we should commit all the reinforcements to just one siege?" I suggested.

"They will see it coming and send even more reinforcements… no, I think we need to forget about the sieges, split our forces, and take as many regions as we can."

"Oh, I see, then they will not be able to recruit any more troops…"

"And then we can continue eroding their defencses until the fortresses fall.”

"But what if they try to snipe our small detachments while they are taking the regions?

"Then we just send the Nazguls to give them combat bonuses. Come on! We can do this!”

And we did. We changed our strategy and after another hour and a half Jun and Sagira were on the edge. We had eight victory points. We needed two more to win. We could get them by just taking one fortress. The problem was that we focused so much on taking regions and eroding defenses in the fortresses that we pretty much ignored the Ring Bearer, and now they were just one step away from Mount Doom… however they also were just one point away from being corrupted by the One Ring.

We attacked the fortress, we were just one good dice roll to winning, but we lost. The fortress held, and now it was their turn. Again, we were just one dice roll form winning, if we could just corrupt the Ring Bearer, or if they didn’t roll any movement points… but we didn’t corrupt them, and they got the one movement point they needed. The Ring was destroyed.

"YEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!

Jun and Sagira were screaming and jumping, while Oakley and me were feeling the frustration. I threw my head back on the chair and covered my face with my hands. Oakley made her hands into fists and shook them intensely…

"Well comrade, we did our best" she said to me.

"And we came very close to victory.”

Jun stopped screaming and jumping with joy.

"You both were truly worthy adversaries.”

Then Sagira jumped on his back.

"And we look forward to beating you both, AGAIN!"

"Some other time" Oakley proposed. "I don’t feel like playing this game again for a while.”

"Preach sister!" I said in agreement.

"I hope…" Jun said, but he was gasping for air. He sat down to rest, but Sagira was still on his back, so she ended up sandwiched between Jun and the chair, much to Jun’s delight. Sagira escaped from this sandwich and sat down on the floor. Finally Jun had the breathe to continue speaking. "I hope one day I can invent a game this good.”

"Inventing a whole game?" I replied. “I can’t imagine how people do that, you have to come up with rules, see if they work, change them… I prefer to master one set of rules to perfection.”

"I never thought" Sagira told me "that priests would like to play board games.”

"Well, I may have an unusual job, but I’m just a normal person. Plenty of normal people have unusual jobs.”

“Hey," Oakley ventured carefully "now that Khalfan isn’t here… can I ask how did you become a priest?"

"I also want to know" Sagira confessed.

"Me too" Jun joined in.

"Well…

Where should I start?. I grew up in a scientific outpost near Titan, just a few thousand people. We didn’t have many luxuries, resources were always tight, but we never lacked anything. We were happy. Then The Silence happened. I was too little to understand what was going, but I remember my confusion. I woke up one day to hear my parents whispering in the kitchen with some of their friends. They were talking about the supply ships being delayed and not answering any calls. No one had been able to contact Earth for days. Complete radio silence. They talked about a lot of things I didn’t understand and don’t remember very well. They were circling this issue over and over looking for an opening but they never found it.

During the chaos I got separated from my parents and I met some… violent people as Oakley likes to call them… and it was horrible. I used to go to sleep fantasizing about my parents suddenly crashing the walls like superheroes coming to save me… but of course that never happened… sorry I got a knot in my throat…

I thought that torment would never end… but it did, thank God. I ended up in a refugee camp orbiting Europa Station. It was amazing… I mean, it wasn’t… it smelled horribly, there was very little food, the water tasted like poorly filtrated urine and blood, it was always crowded everywhere… But when I arrived they took my name and put it in a database. If I died they would know. “Here says a boy named Jacobo should be around here, where is he?, what happened to him?”. They would look for me… they would look for me!.

Then I met her, mother Joana. Who in their right mind would voluntarily have entered that place?, she would, she did. She was a nun, and she came with a whole army of people ready to help. They gave us food, clean water, medicine, they fixed the air filters which I didn’t even know were failing. All for free, all without asking a single thing from us. We would sneak and steal the food they brought, because we didn’t understand… but they didn’t mind, they just asked us to share… “Whomever stole the lentils, please share them!,” they would scream “there will be more food!, we promise!”.

Mother Joana, Father Michael, Lucas, Xochitl… all those people were so good and so pure… I wanted to be like them. So I started learning, I started reading. Not just the Bible, not just about Jesus, but about the Church and its history, the councils, the schisms… There were many dark and shameful times in that history but, in the end… Millions of people searching and serving the ultimate truth for thousands of years… It filled me like nothing else, it inspired me…”

Everyone was in silence, appreciating, thinking.

Jun broke the silence first:

"Why didn’t they rescue the Pope?”

"Back then Linus the Second transmitted regularly. He was on the move, running away form all the mess, trying to get to a space port. I guess they thought the allies who had helped the Pope up to that point would help him get to safety in Mars, Venus or one of the Langrangian points. In the mean time we needed their help the most. They were needed in those refugee camps."

"Their help is still needed" Sagira reminded us.

"You are right" I admitted. "For years I helped them, I followed their example… but you see, the Church is an institution established to help people, the way they helped me. Jesus ordered us to help… but now, without leadership, that institution is… dissolving… Every station you go, every christian community… They do rituals differently, they teach different things… Without authority we are drifting apart, we don’t work together anymore…"

“No one does" lamented Jun. "Every station for themselves.”

"Yes, but the Church can help with that!. It can help us unite under a single institution, and try to rebuild everything we lost… or at least that’s my hope."

Silence again, and again, Jun broke it.

"Well, certainly you are the most altruistic client we’ve ever had… and the best at boardgames too.”

If I had known how much Jun knew about altruism back then, I would have realized he was only being polite.

Then we went to sleep, we were exhausted. I woke up when Jun called us for breakfast some 9 hours later. Then Khalfan took his turn teaching me. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. He made me practice how to apply a tourniquet, what to do if someone falls unconscious, how to treat laser wounds… first aid. Luckily Mother Joana had taught me a little, so I didn’t came at it blank.

Our lesson was interrupted just in time. Khalfan wanted to teach me how to do injections by injecting myself with saline solution, which I’m pretty sure is not how it’s taught in medical school. Thankfully Jun screamed calling all of us to the common room.

The room was dark, only illuminated by the screen Jun had set up to give us his presentation. We stood around him, and his presentation begun.

“Okay everyone, here’s the current job: to acquire a return pod. This is the only way to land and take off safely from that place. Here’s where we are gonna get it form:” he used the control to go to the next slide and I saw it. I was speechless it was too much of a coincidence. “Jabru Station"

“Fuck" I uttered.

“Yes Jacob?”

“Nothing Jun, is just… I know the place… Some people there gave me money for this quest.”

“Well, sadly they didn’t give you a return pod, so we are gonna steal it from their army.”

“The army!”

The others looked at me, tired of my interruptions, but I couldn’t help it, my reactions were genuine.

“Yes,” Jun assured me "specifically from their armory. The place they keep all their guns and ships…”

“It must be the best defended place in all of Jabru Station… this is suicide…”

Jun had gone to the next slide showing a few maps of Jabru Station, but he didn’t continue. He put down his control and spoke to me again.

“I know you are new and you are only gonna be with us for a short while, but you asked to be part of the team, for that reason you have to be part pf the team. The first rule is that we trust each other, completely, utterly. If I tell you this is the plan that’s because we can do it and get away with it. Understood?”

“Yes.” What else could I possibly say?

“As I was saying: the pod is in the armory. That would be here, in this section of the outer layer of the cylinder…”

Jabru is a spinning cylinder too, but MUCH larger than Astoreth Station. It is so large clouds naturally form around its spine. Here is where I met rain for the first time.

 Flowing from that spine, instead of the straight columns from Astoreth Station, there are huge columns with organic looking shapes. These columns connect to the station as if they had grown out of it. They are as tall as mountains here on Earth, but they have holes inside as part of their organic design, and each one looks different. Just like in Astoreth the Spine and the Ribs produce the light to simulate day and night, but here the light seems to emanate uniformly from the whole surface. It shines.

Jabru station is so large Jabru City occupies just part of the inner surface of the cylinder. The city is just a ring of buildings and streets looping over the middle of the station. Where the city ends it gives rise to forests and meadows where wild animals live. There’s even a river called Ea which spirals around the station and crosses the city until it reaches Napirisha, a lake on one extreme of the station. People can always be seen swimming and playing in this lake. The water here is constantly being drained to match the flow of the river and pumped back to the other side of the station where it is released in a waterfall. People call this “the hidden Ea” because it’s kinda like a river too.

But before we could see all of that we had to arrive at the port, and for a second we thought we wouldn’t. As we got closer to Jabru the instruments of the ship kept detecting more and more ships. All of us were converging onto Jabru, but suddenly we detected one that wasn’t. This ship was much larger. Segira put it on screen. I was nearly a kilometer long, it was white, and shaped like an elongated cone, and it seemed to have steps like a pyramid, but those were not steps, those were guns. This was one of the military ships from the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate. One of the few who had survived the many past and ongoing civil wars.

“Was is that thing doing here?” Oakley asked. “Does it belong to Jabru Station?”

“Negative” Sagira replied. "I just hailed the ship and got an automatic reply. Apparently that’s the Anbay Battlecruiser, and get this, temporary seat of government of the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate…”

Jun and Khalfan laughed at this, Sagira laughed a little, but she held it back to continue.

“…by orders of the temporary Secretary-General of the United Nations…”

“So…” I intervened. “This guy is a captain who argues they are the heirs of UNUM?, is that right?”

“Not quite” replied Khalfan, respectfully for once. “They would argue they are not heirs or successors to anything, they would argue that legally, since everyone else in the chain of command is dead, they are the ones in charge. It’s a subtle but important difference for them.”

“Should we be worried?” Oakley asked all of us.

“Nah" Sagira assured us. “It’s not a Carrier, and they are too far away to threaten anything besides, Jabru has its own fleet. They are just there to try to scare people… they are also sending this other message saying that Jabru is rebel controlled territory, that it’s not safe, to please go to their ship and wait to be escorted to a safe docking station… pathetic.”

 Just like in Astoreth the two flat sides of Jabru Station serve as ports, but the ports are isolated from the rest of the station by another set of giant walls. 

Imagine how awkward would it be to try to swim in the lake and you can see this kilometers tall port full of ships… it kills the mood. For that reason the side of those walls facing the interior of the station are made to look like the side of jagged mountains full of cliffs. There are trees growing among the steep rocks, and many birds make their nests there.

However this means that when you arrive at the port and get out of ship you just see these endless concentrical rings of ships, catwalks, cranes, people and crews moving calmly or in a hurry in all directions, cranes and shipping containers moving all around. It’s like the innards of an industrial beast. 

In fact when I got off The Joke and looked up I saw a crane above me on the opposite side of the ring. It picked up a shipping container and for a second I was scared, it felt like the container was going to fall on us, but of course it didn’t. I guess there’s a part of the human brain that never gets completely accustomed to seeing objects interacting with gravity in the opposite way you are.

At first I wondered how we were going to pass through migration, but Jun explained they would simply show their real documents.

“Many criminals have their crimes in their main accounts” Jun had explained. “That's why they require fake identities. We’ve been careful since the start to have all our crimes in our alt accounts, so we don’t need fake clean accounts because the real ones are already clean.”

Then Oakley summarized: “No better way to cheat the system, than to tell the truth.”

I wanted to peak at the screens and see their real names, but it was too quick, I blinked and I missed it, or I just wasn’t able to read fast enough.

 

After migration we passed to a room with huge windows cut right into the wall, allowing us to see Kiririsha forest extending far away and looping over the wall. We could see the birds flying from one side to the cylinder to another. I love the elegant movements they do near the middle to adjust to the change in the direction of gravity. They make it look so easy. We could even see water vapor rising from the treetops, forming clouds. If you paid attention you could even notice that plants seem to cluster around the base of the ribs, because they are fighting to be closer to their light.

We waited in this room for a train that goes inside the wall and only takes people from the port to the train station in Jabru City. Sadly, there are no real windows in this train.

Once in the train we didn’t speak to each other anymore, and we started drifting apart little by little. You see, Jun had separated us into teams. Oakley and I had to sneak into the armory and get the Return Pod, Sagira and Khalfan would smuggle it out of Jabru Station and send it to the rendezvous point and Jun… wasn’t very clear on what he had to do. He mentioned he would meet with his contacts, make sure everything was in place, and give us the go-ahead, but I doubted doing those things implied just a simple meeting.

When we finally arrived at the train station Oakley and I got off the train together, and I could not see any of the others among the crowd.

I like these kinds of places, you know?. Places were a lot of travelers converge before going their separate ways. I like to see all those different kinds of people, each living their own story. I love seeing people holding signs in languages I cannot read, and I love when the person that sign is meant for finally arrives and they receive each other with genuine joy. I even like how these places tend to be packed with stores selling things you can find for much cheaper just outside this place, and I love how time seems to not exists in such places. It’s totally normal to see someone having dinner in their pajamas and drinking vodka while they wait for their train or launch window.

Then we finally got of the station. The huge green sky of Jabru City revealed itself to us. The mighty spine and the huge ribs rose up to the clouds. But going back to the ground, suddenly we were on the middle of a busy city, surrounded by busy people and tall buildings made of bricks or concrete. Only a few buildings were built Earth-style with that opaque glass that apparently was so popular. The first floor of all these buildings were inhabited by small stores, coffee shops, or some other kind of small business, while the streets had a healthy population of carts selling junk food to those who were too late to eat breakfast at home.

As luck would have it suddenly we were all there. After loosing each other in the train and trying to go our separate ways the mercenaries and I ended up in the sidewalk at the same time waiting for cars to leave their passengers so that we could get in.

Amazingly they didn’t laugh, they didn’t react to the coincidence, because we were supposed to act as tourists who were complete strangers, there would be time to laugh about it later.

Now I guess I finally have to address a detail I had been avoiding. I hoped I could avoid it entirely because I find it embarrassing, but if I want to tell you my story I have to say it. In order to blend in and rise no suspicion we were supposed to act like couples. Except for Jun, of course. And not just that, we were supposed to be dressed as tourists. Jun was dressed with an unbuttoned shirt, jeans, dark glasses and generally looking like one of those guys with too much money who like to make big bets and never drinks water. Sagira was dressed with short denim shorts, dark glasses, and a crop top which didn’t fit her personality but it fit the personality she was pretending to have. Khalfan was wearing a properly buttoned shirt, sandals, and beige linen pants. Segira was hugging one of his huge muscular arms, they really looked like a couple.

Meanwhile, Oakley and I… well… we were dressed like a dorky couple. Like tourists cosplaying as tourists. I guess they didn’t trust I could pull out a more daring look, so they gave me a pair of shorts, a hawaiian shirt, and a hat. Oakley was wearing the female version of that look: tighter shorts, a tank top to go under the shirt, dark glasses and a wider hat.

My sincerest apologies of you like to dress that way. I mean no disrespect. I just want to explain how uncomfortable I felt wearing that.

Oakley and I looked at each other. It was so fucking awkward, but the next instant Oakley was over it and she was acting so natural. She was taking selfies with me, pointing at pretty buildings, laughing, and in general acting all girlfriendly, but I couldn’t pretend. I was stiff and cold like when I go into a dance floor and I don’t know how to move like everyone else. I figured I would just look forward and keep holding her hand. I must have looked like the worst boyfriend ever.

We were walking around Victory plaza, looking for a place to eat when Oakley stopped in front of one of the statues. Let me explain:

This plaza was built on the ruins of a neighborhood that was completely destroyed during the civil war. It has many statues and on the floor there is a spiral pattern that starts at the center of the plaza. If you start there and follow the spiral you will see all the statues in order. They tell the story of how the citizens of Jabru were puzzled by the sudden radio silence form Earth, how the supply ships stopped coming, the years of struggle that followed as they tried to survive, and how they finally destroyed the Artificial Intelligence that ruled the station. It ends with a statue of Ishtar, the goddess of war, beauty and power, standing over broken computer parts, and surrounded by the citizens of the station as they stablished a new independent civilian government. 

That was the statue Oakley was admiring in that moment, almost like in a trance.

“Can you believe many people actually fought for the A.I.?” she asked me. “The old world had collapsed, and yet there were people still pretending it existed. People still trying to pay taxes to dead governments, or trying to enforce their laws. It’s like they dreamed one day a representative of the United Nations would come and congratulate them for their loyalty, explaining it had all been a test and they had passed… but their stubbornness was only causing more harm… They had to torn down everything, and make something new.”

“How selfish” I replied.

Oakley wanted to ask me why I said that, but I walked away before she could speak.

Chapter 4

I was looking at the single bed in our hotel room while Oakley unpacked her pajamas.

“Is there a problem?” she asked me.

“I'd rather not share a bed with a woman.”

“Why?. Don’t you have to…” she made a snipping motion with her fingers, which felt flirty somehow, “…to become a priest?”

“What?, no!. Who told you that?. My genitals are intact so… if I wanted, I could… and that’s what makes it awkward.”

“Well, even if you wanted, I don’t. I should have started with that. So don’t worry, there are no temptations here.”

“Thanks… but I would still like to sleep somewhere else.”

“If you don’t like to share I’m pretty sure the couch turns into a bed.”

I went to check, and the couch indeed turned into a bed. I was relieved.

“Why couldn’t Jun just book us a room with two beds?”

“It could be the smallest detail what dooms a mission. No one thinks twice about a couple booking a room with one bed.”

“I think he just wanted to mess with me.”

“Hmmmmm" she considered my hypothesis. “Maybe, is it working?”

“Yes.”

“Then he definitely wanted to mess with you. Luckily I was right about the couch.”

I looked at my phone. I had a ton of notifications I had not checked since the mission started. One in particular captured my attention. Oakley went into the bathroom to get changed. I looked at the time.

“Do you think we’ll get the go-ahead in the middle of the night?“ I asked.

“Maybe…” she replied, her voice distorted in the way only bathrooms do. Why is that?, why specifically bathrooms and not kitchens or closets?. Anyway, she continued. “Why do you ask?, do you wanna go somewhere?”

“I just wanna have a couple of drinks at the hotel bar.”

“As long as we are nearby it should be fine. Just don’t come back too late. We need to be well rested.”

“Yes, of course” I lied.

And then I left.

I didn’t go to the bar, I passed next to it, but I continued and went outside the hotel to wait for someone in the sidewalk. Soon enough I saw a private car coming, and I knew it was him. The car stopped in front of me and I got in.

“Mister Acharya” I greeted him. “I didn’t expect you to come pick me up personally.”

“And miss these minutes I could have been speaking with you Jacob?, nonsense!. I’m so happy to see you. When I got the notification that a friend was nearby I immediately thought about you, and I was right!. What brings you here?”

“Well, it’s part of my quest. I can’t really say.”

“You found another mecenas to finance your quest?”

“In fact, the quest is already ongoing, that’s why I can’t say…”

Mister Acharya laughed.

“I understand. I did daring things in my time too.”

“Oddly enough, the most daring thing I’m doing right now is talking with you.”

Mister Acharya seemed delighted by that comment.

“Still, I am so happy you found time to see me in your important quest. I have something I want to show you.”

We drove past the residential areas of the city. Quite drastically all the nice buildings were gone, and we were surrounded by empty concrete shells, covered in bullet holes. It had been nearly 20 years since the civil war, and yet there remained so much more to repair. Here and there a few buildings were still inhabited though, probably by the poorest people in Jabru City.

It reminded me of the many poor and devastated places I had preached in. Misery is always similar.

Unexpectedly the ruined buildings stopped. I did not even notice when the buildings changed, I tried to look through the back window but it was hard to turn around in the car. Mister Acharya laughed.

“It is a change, isn’t it?”

“Why was this area rebuilt before those other ones?, I thought there was a fifty year schedule…”

“There is… this is a different project… here we are”

We got off the car and I looked around. There were a few people coming and going, but it felt different than the rest of the city.

“Come, come,” Mister Acharya told me. He took my hand and guided me towards a building across the street.

Inside there was a shelf for people to put their shoes in, and I noticed my shoes were much larger than the other shoes in the shelf.

Mister Acharya guided me through several doors and hallways, until we reached a diner with some 200 or 300 people, all of them were children.

“They are all refugees,” Mister Acharya told me. “I pulled some strings and I convinced the Citizen Council that we could do more, that we HAD to do more. The children in this orphanage, and the people living in this neighborhood, are all refugees, earning their citizenship… I wanted to just make them citizens… but I had to make some concessions… I know it’s not enough…”

I stopped listening to be honest. I was just in shock to see so many children just eating there, without fear of anyone hurting them. Certain they would eat tomorrow. Not being forced to… do anything.

I pushed the words through the knot in my throat: “Thank you Mister Acharya.”

“No, thank you Jacob, you converted me… not to christianity, I still follow Siddhartha… but you converted me to compassion, and empathy… you made me a better buddhist, and a better person.”

Afterwards we walked around the neighborhood and Mister Acharya showed me the apartment buildings and the hospital run by the refugees themselves. I expected him to be proud of everything they had accomplished, but instead at every turn he seemed frustrated by how much was left to be done. 

Finally we arrived at a park and we sat on a bench. Mister Acharya had already showed me what he wanted to show me, but I too had something in mind, something I was very nervous to bring up… so mentioned something else instead.

“When I was arriving to the station our ship was hailed by a battleship stationed nearby. it seems they wanted to intimidate people to go to their base instead… aren’t you worried?, I had never seen something like that.”

“Yeah, that's been a headache for the last few weeks. What happened was… you know how there are a ton of military bases all claiming to be the new seat of the United Nations?, each one with a general claiming to be the Acting Secretary General?. Well apparently someone managed to get many of those bases to agree on something for a change. Since then they have been going around intimidating other stations in the region… but don’t worry, they are not that strong and we’ve already asked a friend for help.”

“Oh, that’s great then… you know I also need a friend to help me with something.”

“Whatever it is Father,” he replied.

“I can maybe fulfil my quest... but I have to work with... violent people.” 

"Like Douglas?, Jacob please…"

"No!... They are not like... him... I still hold our deal. But they are violent... and the worse part is the things I know I‘ll have to do. I’ll have to lie and worse. I don‘t want to loose my principles because I‘m trying to save them.”

“I think I understand. I had a similar problem when The Silence happened and this city became so chaotic and tragic... To save this place we had to do so many things we never imagined we would ever do... we questioned what we were willing to pay to achieve our goal... But that was the trick, our goal was not only to depose the old government, but to do it in a way that didn’t betray our ideals, even if that meant we would not achieve that goal.”

“Thank you Mister Acharya, I think I understand.”

We talked a couple of minutes more, then we called another car, we got in, and Mister Acharya was going to drop me back in the hotel, but then I looked through the window and I saw someone on the side of the road.

“Car, stop” I said.

“Why are we stopping?” Mister Acharya asked me.

“You see that person?, she’s a friend of mine… I met her last time I was in the city… what a funny coincidence… I am gonna say hi.”

“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine,” he replied and soon we both got of the car.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello!,” she replied, very happy and very friendly, “I didn’t expect to find you here in the refugee district, what brings you here?”

“Emmm…” Mister Acharya interrupted, “hello, I am Mahavira Acharya, Father Jacob told me you are friends.”

“Very good friends, we have not seen each other in a while, we have a lot to catch up on.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “thanks for the ride Mister Acharya, but I’m gonna stay here. I’ll call another car later.”

“Oh, okay, well, it was great seeing you, call me before you leave the city, and do get a car, it’s not safe to walk through the ruined districts, as much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Goodbye, it was great seeing you too.”

He got in his car again, and the car drove away.

I turned back to Oakley and she was showing her real self again.

"NEVER do that again,” she was breathing deeply, her muscles were tense with rage. "If the mission gets fucked up you are not only wasting your fucking money you are also wasting our god- damned-time!”

"I had to meet him.”

“Yes, I saw, he lets a couple hundreds of people live far from the rest of the city, surrounded by ruins, and you both cry. Very pretty.”

She started walking towards the city, her rage on every step as she got away form the refugee district. I followed her.

“He is doing what he can, besides, that’s not why I had to meet him… I needed his advice…”

“I heard that too, you are worried about lying, stealing, and working with violent people. Are those your problems?, Have you always been so privileged that’s what you worry about?”

It was a good thing by then we were among the ruins were no one could hear us scream, because that comment made my really angry.

“I NEVER had privilege!, you saw that, you saw me remember the things I had to do… We come form the same world.”

"If we play the pity Olympics I have you beaten boy. I lived in Ceres.”

I froze, my feet just couldn’t move as I suddenly imagined her as a child in that place. She turned around, she saw my expression and she laughed, a laugh poisoned by rage.

“They made you kill other children?, I had to fucking eat them, adults too. We would gather and draw straws to decide who would be eaten, and only if you had drawn a straw you could eat from that person.”

“I am so sorry Oakley.”

“And it was so easy to solve, so simple!…” she was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Akras, that cursed A.I., was so worried about following the protocol it would not let anyone in or out without the proper permits… But guess what?!… The government with the authority to issue those permits didn’t exist anymore!, everyone with the authority to make those permits was dead!.”

“I heard about it.”

“I'm sorry you cannot exit Ceres Station without a proper Visa…” she said with a mocking voice, imitating the voice of the A.I. “And we would beg, and supplicate, kneeling in front of the control panels: please Akras, please, we are hungry, there’s no more food in the station. At least let someone inside, someone with food… But it would not. We tried to open the port doors. We tried to blast them open. Nothing ever worked… and it knew, it understood perfectly what was happening, it just didn’t care about our suffering, it wasn’t programmed to care.”

“I am so happy you made it out alive,” what else could I possibly say?.

“They congratulated you when you killed other kids?, well, I once found a corpse in an alley and I cried of joy, because I could eat them without having to kill them, and then I cried because I kept the body a secret and most of it rot away.”

“I am so sorry Oakley.”

"You better be. If I tell Jun what you just did he may very well drop the contract. If we had gotten the go-ahead while you were with your friend and I had not followed you we might have lost our chance. We HAVE to trust everyone in the team. It’s the only thing we have. That‘s our law." 

"You are right... Those are the rules in this team, and I will follow the rules. I just don’t like to be involved with... violent people and…”

Oakley raised a hand and looked away, containing her anger. She breathed deeply.

"We are not like the violent people who hurt you, okay?. No kid plays with knives here. That’s also part of our law.”

We walked all the way back to the hotel. I saw some people watching us form inside the ruins a couple of times, but we just ignored them. When we arrived at the room I saw that the couch had been prepared into a bed with sheets and a pillow.

I didn’t sleep very well that night, and I woke up very early,  but I didn’t stood up until Oakley was awake too, she needed the rest. We went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast and we both were very quiet and awkward.

When Oakley got her omelette she just stared at it, lost in her thoughts, or worse, in her memories. Luckily both our cellphones vibrated with a notification… I know here on Earth it’s been a long time since anyone used a blockchain, so let me explain. The blockchain that is used to send money can also be used to send encrypted messages that only people with the right private key can read, and your cellphone lets you know whenever it finds a message in the blockchain you can decode.

In this case Jun’s message simply said: “Wait another day”.

“I guess that means we won’t get the go-ahead today?,“ I asked Oakley.

“Yes, we have a free day… or well, it’s free for me, you are still paying for the hotel.”

“What else should I pay for?”

“Uh?”

“Yeah, I mean, what do you wanna do?, we are not gonna stay in the hotel all day.”

“Well, if I can indulge in decadence, I’ve always wondered how it is to have so much water you can actually swim on it, but they probably charge a fortune to go into the lake.”

“It's actually free.”

Her pupils got incredibly wide with disbelief. 

“Free?, you can swim, for free?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck are we doing here?”

She took a napkin, put her omelette on it, and stoop up. I grabbed my waffles, drank my orange juice in one gulp, and followed her.

First we went to a store to buy swimming clothes. Oakley bought one that looked out of the 1950’s, with stripes and everything. I am convinced she literally printed the first one she saw.

Then we went to the lake. A great expanse of shimmering water looping ahead and above us. Across the lake the wall hiding us form the port was made to look like a mountain’s cliff, except for the place where the spine connected to it.

The shore was full of people having fun and on the other shore you could see people climbing the cliff and jumping back into the water.

I walked to the water but Oakley just stood there. I looked back as if asking why wouldn’t she come.

“I don’t know how to swim,” she explained.

“I didn’t know either, but it’s not that hard. I’ll teach you.”

She got in the water slowly and I tried to teach her the same way I learned, holding her as she learned to float. Showing her how to use her arms and legs to paddle on the water.

She learned extremely quickly. As soon as she got a little confident in her abilities she wanted us to cross the lake to jump form the cliffs, and we did get to the other shore, but we were so tired we had to rest for like half an hour (which she spent entirely sitting on shallow water). Then we jumped from the cliff on to the water. She would just not get tired of it, and soon enough he was making friends with the other people who were there to jump.

I liked to look up instead of down when I jumped, and see the lake above of me when I got into the water bellow.

We were there all day, even using our cellphones to order a drone to bring us food to the cliff.

Oakley wanted to stay even as the spine began to shine less and less, the equivalent of a sunset here, but a lot less impressive. In the end I convinced her swimming at night is not a great idea and we finally went back to the hotel.

“I can’t believe this place even exists,” Oakley told me as we dried up in the shore with the other people going back home.

“It used to be that every station had a lake,” I commented.

“Really?, even Astoreth?”

“Not literally every station, but yes, maybe. Th point is that they were super common. All across the Solar System, wether on Earth, Mars, or one of the myriad of Orbital Cities, people were free to swim… or so I’ve heard from old people.”

“Must have been nice.”

“At least this place survived.”

“Thanks to your friend Mahavira?”

“I prefer to call him Mister Acharya.”

“You have interesting friends.”

Next morning I couldn’t eat my waffles in peace either because as soon as I had put honey on them we finally got the go-ahead from Jun.

We went to the train station and got into a train. Jabru City is not the only settlement in Jabru Station, there are a few small towns around the station. They were made by survivors who had to escape form the city during the civil war and refused to move back when it was over, forcing the Station’s government to create a few train tracks to connect them to the city.

We didn’t got off in one of those towns, but rather we got off at a station that was just a concrete block in the middle of the countryside, with stairs on one side and a sign on the other. 

After the train left we jumped down the platform and we headed towards Kiririsha Forest.

It was dense with vegetation and bothersome roots growing above the ground. We walked deep into this forest until we were surrounded by it. I could not see signs of the grasslands we had seen from the train. If not for the omnipresent Spine of the station it would have been really easy to get lost.

“How is this hatch supposed to look like?”, I asked.

“I don’t know, like a hatch with a round handle on top.”

“Perhaps we should message Jun and tell him we can’t find the entrance.”

“No, even if only Jun can read the message the city could detect that a transmission came from here, which could make them suspicious. Just look around, this should be the place.”

We kept looking around until Oakley finally found it, nearly covered by the roots of a tree.

Luckily we had brought backpacks with tools. We took out a pair of knives and hacked away the roots.

“Now what?,” I wondered.

“Well, we open it. Any locks or alarms on it should be deactivated according to Jun.”

She tried to turn the handle of the hatch, but she couldn’t, so I joined in. The metal was rusted and there probably was also dirt and dust in the mechanism. We could feel it grinding. We had to put all our strength and and our bodies into it, but we finally managed to make the handle move, and we could feel how the hatch was released from it’s seal. Then we had to actually move the hatch which was also difficult because the hinges were similarly rusted.

In the end after all our effort I could only see a deep dark tunnel lined with rusted handles to help one go down.

“This has not been used since at least The Silence or the civil war,” I thought out loud, “how did Jun even find out about this thing?”

“All I know is that Jun also has very interesting friends. Let’s get changed before we down.”

The clothes in question were black and very loose, enough to make any movement easy and unrestrained, but not so much the friction of the clothes would make noise. We completed our outfits with a few knives, flashlights and other helpful tools, but we left the backpacks next to the hatch.

“If the hatch was left alone for this long, our stuff should be too,” she reasoned.

And we went down.

Chapter 5

Everything in a space station is built just to protect the empty space inside from the empty space outside. To accomplish this the cylinder is built with many layers, the first one is a radiation shield, the second one gives structural support, the third one holds life support systems like air filters and so on. This means the walls of the cylinder have to be quite thick, which leaves a lot of room inside them, enough to hold another city. Most stations use that room to store supplies, water, fuel, or in the case of Jabru Station, an army.

It was known that since the end of the civil war the Citizen Council had stored their weapons, mech suits, ammunition and even entire space ships “underground” (in between the walls).

What wasn’t known, what came as a complete shock to me, was that apparently there was a system of tunnels across all the station. And not just service tunnels engineers could use to make repairs here and there. These were large tunnels wide enough for a mech to pass through. All of them carefully labeled and signalled. When Jun showed us the diagrams during his presentation I wanted to think he was lying, but now I was seeing them with my own eyes.

The existence of these tunnels could only mean the government who built this station wanted to be able to deploy troops anywhere in the station at any moment, which explained many legends from the civil war about UNUM possessing secret teleportation technology. And the fact the Citizen Council kept the existence of these tunnels a secret meant they wanted to be able to do the same.

Those were the tunnels Oakley and I were walking through at that moment, with only a small flying drone shinning ahead of us to light our way.

“Maybe we should take some pictures,” I suggested, “and then release them anonymously, to show to the citizens of Jabru Station what their government is hiding form them.”

“That's not part of the mission. We won’t do it.”

“I never imagined mercenaries to be such sticklers for the rules.”

"We are soldiers after all, that’s what a mercenary is, a soldier who chooses their fights.”

“Really?, could you choose not to do this job?”

“Sure, I could choose to skip on any job.”

“What would Jun say?”

“He'd be angry or disappointed, less likely to hire me in the future.”

“So you have to obey anyway.”

“I just have to accept the consequences for disobedience, which are much more lenient than in a regular army.”

“Talking about a regular army, I think we have arrived.”

“We are but… how do you know?”

“Jun said we would have to walk for four thousand meters, but then I noticed there are these kilometer markers in the walls, the one closest to when we entered said 3230 and the one we just passed was 3226. Which by the way must mean these tunnels spiral through the station instead of being straight.”

“Oh, for a second I thought you also counted the meters like me.”

“No, I just remembered to look out for the number 3226, it’s actually my favorite Bible passage.”

“Your favorite?”

“ ‘Then he said, 'Let me go, for the day has broken.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.'... Genesis 32:26, It’s about a guy who fought an angel.”

“Fought an angel?, sounds interesting.”

“Yeah… wait, did you say you counted the meters?”

“Yes."

“You can count how many meters you’ve walked?”

“Sure.”

“Wow."

“Okay, enough talking. This door should be open with no alarms too, help me.”

This door was not meant to be seen as a door. The seams were nearly invisible, even with my fingers I could barely feel them. Probably the whole tunnel was lined with secret doors like this one.  

We had to pull on the door, and that was impossible with it being just a featureless slab of metal. Luckily Oakley had brought suction cups and ropes. We stuck them to the door and pull with all our strength, opening it just barely enough for Oakley to pass. I am not as thin as she is, but with some effort I managed to pass too.

I knew we were inside the armory of Jabru Station, but we happened to come out behind a tall shelf full of metal boxes. In fact, there seemed to be a long row of similar shelfs across this wall, with just a narrow space between them and the wall. The shelves were probably put there to hide the secret doors from the soldiers working in the armory.

Oakley moved to the end of the shelf and used a mirror to peak to the other side. I looked into the mirror and I saw the armory was much larger than I had expected. In between the shelves of ammunition and mechas parked in groups there were halls extending far into the distance, to the point the floor curved up and and the roof eventually blocked your sight. There were more weapons here than the army of Jabru Station could possibly use.

I looked back at Oakley. She had closed her eyes and she was muttering something, reviewing in her mind the map we had seen of this place and matching it to what se was seeing.

“Got it,” she announced.

We had to trust Jun that any automated system that could find us had been deactivated somehow, but there was nothing he could do if there happened to be people there at that time, so we had to rely on stealth.

Oakley moved sneakily, expertly, going from cover to cover, staying in the shadows. She looked back and to her surprise I was following her, perhaps not as quickly, but equally silently and covertly. I like to think I was like a bull going through a glass store without actually breaking anything.

Oakley smiled, and then we both got sad for a second, because we both understood we had learned to do this by living things children shouldn’t have to live.

Finally she used her mirror again to peak to the other side of a rack of ammunition. There was a group of six return pods parked together.

Return pods are actually really big. They are as large as a room, but they are cylindrical, with a conical roof, and they are like 3 our 4 meters tall. Come to think of it they have some resemblance with the portable houses mongol people used to live in… if you have seen those Return Pods are kinda like that, just smaller and made of metal.

Jun had promised that somehow there would be a forklift we could use to move the return pod, but we couldn’t see it anywhere, then we heard it.

Along one of the hallways came a forklift with two people on it. They were talking, you could tell they were friends. We had arrived before they could leave the forklift here.

Oakley and I couldn’t talk, but it was one of those times when you can sort of read someone’s mind. We both were thinking these guys were supposed to bring the forklift here, but they probably didn’t know why. Maybe Jun had bribed their boss to send them here without much of an explanation. 

They parked near the return pods but then they just stayed there, talking about workplace gossip.

I looked at Oakley and I thought “maybe they will leave soon, let’s wait” but she thought “what if we wait but they just drive the forklift away?”.

She was right, Jun told us there would be a forklift for us to use, but he never said it would be unattended…

Oakley placed one hand on top of the crates we where hiding behind and with one fluid motion she jumped over it. I followed her.

The worker on the driver's seat looked at Oakley, but before they could react she had dragged him out of the forklift and she had her arm around his neck. The other worker was also looking at Oakley, so she didn’t see me when I dragged her out and I too used my arm to stop her from breathing or screaming for help.

The trick to make someone faint this way is that you should not only block the flow of air, but also blood. Sadly there was someone who taught me really well how to do this by doing it on me and after a couple of seconds I could see in her face that expression people have when they faint, a mix between surprise and boredom.

I placed her on the floor and went to check on Oakley. His guy was still conscious. Apparently he was one of those beefy guys, not as much as Khalfan, but enough for Oakley’s chokehold not to work.

"I’ve got this, he’s not getting away,” she assured me and I believed her, the problem was since she couldn’t make him faint she was probably trying to kill him.

“I'll knock him out,” I announced.

“What?”

“Move you head to the side.”

I got in position and then I moved my whole body with one quick motion to put all my strength onto my fist, impacting that guy’s face and finally making him unconscious.

Oakley just dropped him but I caught him before his head hit the floor and placed him gently there.

“Wow, so I got easy last time?” Oakley asked me, seeing me drag the unconscious guy away.

“When you had me on the floor I could only use the strength of my arm, here I used the strength of my whole body.”

“I think you fractured his skull, when this guy wakes up he’s gonna feel like shit.”

“At least he’ll wake up. You were gonna kill him.”

“Talking about waking up…” she looked around her many pockets and found some kind of tissue inside a sealed plastic bag, “be careful not to smell it, and place it on their faces. It’ll prevent them from waking up for a while.”

“Why didn’t we use it from the start?”

“It can take like five minutes to take effect. Are you gonna hold them in place for five minutes with a rage on their faces while they fight back?. Besides, if their hold their breath…”

“Okay, I get it.”

We moved the two people to the space between the shelves and the wall so no one could see them, although there did not seem to be anyone else around.

Then we got on the forklift, it was so messy. It was full of napkins, food wrappings, orange peels, orange vests, grape seeds everywhere… we made some space among all the mess and sat there.

The machine was activated with a panel that would analyze your fingerprints. Oakley looked in her many pockets and she found a weird transparent device with a metal frame. She placed it on top of the panel and then she put her own finger on top. Amazingly the forklift was activated.

Oakley was driving the thing, and she did it pretty well. She positioned the forklift in front of one of the return pods.

“I need you to check the screen on the dashboard and tell me if the aiming is correct,” she reminded me, but I was already doing that.

“You are nearly there, just a little bit further ahead… there!, no, go back a little… there!”

Then she pressed a button and the forklift unfurled its fork. I wonder why we call that thing a  "fork" when it’s actually a cylinder made of thing wires, it looks nothing like a fork. It should be called a cylinlift or something like that.

Anyway, the wires surrounded the return pod at the top, the sides, and they even got bellow it. Finally the wires closed the cylinder on the other side, leaving the return pod in a sort of cage. Then electricity began flowing through the wires creating a dynamic magnetic field that lifted the return pod off the ground and kept it floating without actually touching the sides of the cage.

Many people don’t know this, but at the same time the forklift activate another magnet that keeps it stuck on the ground, acting like a counterweight and allowing the forklift to move objects many times heavier than itself, like Mech Suits or small spaceships.

Now all we had to do was to come out the same way we had come in, through the secret door, which was difficult because of the shelves.

We took the ropes Oakley had, tied one side to the bars in the corner of one shelve and the other side to the forklift. Then we just used the forklift to move the shelve just enough for the return pod and the forklift to go through.

It felt weird, it felt wrong. We were doing something too noticeable, too noisy, too bold… but it worked. I got back on the forkliift after pushing the door open and untying the ropes and Oakley was driving us out…

“What are you doing?,” said a man looking at us, then looking at the open door leading to the secret tunnel.

I have no idea where he came from. He was a soldier and he was carrying a box. He was probably sent to retrieve something or to leave something in the armory, and he found us.

Oakley and I did not need to have one of those moments when you know what the other person is thinking, because we were thinking the same thing.

She reached for one of her pockets, the largest one, she opened it, inside there was a gun.

“Weird right?,” I said pointing at the door with one hand and placing the other in Oakley’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” the man replied “I did not know there were doors here that opened to service hallways.”

“We only use them sometimes,” I assured him, "like when moving these things, these… re… ra…”

“Return pods?” he suggested.

“Yeah, that’s what they’re called.”

He did not look interested in the door anymore, but he was looking at us.

“Are you guys from the seventeenth?”

I acted as if I had just remembered something and looking through all the mess I grabbed the orange vests. I put one on and handed the other one to Oakley.

“Sorry, we forgot to put on the maintainance vests, my partner here is a mess,” I said while pointing to Oakley who was just frozen in place.

The soldier looked at all the mess we had in the forklift, specially the food wrappings that fell to the ground when I took the vests.

“You guys are gonna get in trouble for that. You know how these guys are about recycling.”

“And can you believe the new regulations?. They are impossible to meet!”

“The Council doesn’t care about practicality”

“I know right!”

“Talking about practicality, maybe you should use the cargo trains to move that thing.”

“Maybe, but we’ve got orders… you know how it is.”

“Sometimes I wish we could disobey a little and just do what makes more sense.”

“If only… but we have to get going, in fact, could you open the door a little more?, I think I didn’t open it enough.”

“Sure.”

He opened the door for us and we drove through it. We stopped to close the door but he was already closing it behind us.

“Thanks and goodbye!,” I said to him.

He waved goodbye back and then he said:

“Hey!, I hope one day you can disobey and just do what makes more sense.”

Looking back, that was my second blessing during this quest.

Back in the tunnel the lantern drone was again lighting our way, and I was shaking.

“You handled that amazingly. I was simply gonna kill the guy,” Oakley told me while she patted me in the back.

“I know, I couldn’t allow it.”

“Kill a witness or leave them alive, either way things get messy. But at least in this case he doesn’t even know what he witnessed. It may be the best solution.”

“It still puts a timer on us.”

“It's probably longer than the timer we already have. The one before they notice the pod is missing… Relax!, everything’s going excellently!. You are a very good liar.”

“I didn’t say a single lie.”

“What?, I saw you.”

“Everything I told the soldier was completely true.”

“Really?, hmmm, well, that makes you an even better liar, if you can make people believe lies while telling only the truth.”

“Like the devil.”

“The devil… are angels bad in your religion?”

“No, why do you think that?”

“Well, I’ve heard christians think the devil is an angel, right?, and earlier you mentioned that story about a guy who killed an angel.”

“No, angels are good, and Jacob didn’t kill the angel, they just fought.”

“Well, if angels are good why was it fighting with someone?”

“It's a long story.”

“Look, we don’t have much else to do for the meantime other than drive through this tunnel, and it’s not like this machine will go any faster… so tell me the story, please.”

“Okay, where should I begin, all these stories are just part of one larger story… there was a guy named Abraham, he got a blessing from God, the blessing that he would be the father of a great nation. Abraham had a son, Isaac, and he passed down the blessing to his son…”

“Like an inheritance?”

“Kinda.”

“But like… a blessing is just words, right?, how can you pass it to someone, where do you even have it?”

“You just have it, it’s in you.”

“Well, how can you pass it to someone else?”

“You just bless that person... you just tell them that you are giving them a blessing and then they have it.”

“If I say 'I bless you', what?, do you have my blessing now?”

"Yeah, and I appreciate it a lot.”

"Sounds a little like that childrens’ game, the one where children run from each other because one of them is ‘it' and when they touch someone they say 'you are it!' and now that second child has to catch someone else.”

"I suppose blessings work a little like that game, except here you actually want to have the blessing.”

“Okay so now that Isaac had the blessing, what?, an angel wanted to take it from him?”

“No, not at all. Isaac had two sons, they were fraternal twins, Esau and Jacob. Esau was strong and popular, while Jacob was bookish and reserved.”

“Oh, I get it, they were opposites.”

“Yeah, and Esau was the oldest, so Isaac was going to pass the blessing to him. One day Esau came back from hunting and he sees Jacob eating a bean soup, he asks to have some of it but Jacob doesn’t want to share. Esau asks Jacob what does he want in return for the soup and Jacob replies something like: ‘The only thing I want from you is the right to our father’s blessing’. To Jacob’s surprise Esau agrees.”

“Meaning that Esau didn’t appreciate the blessing.”

“Either that or those were some mighty good beans. Anyway, years later Isaac is blind and old. Isaac tells Esau to bring him some food and then he will finally get the blessing. Jacob hears what’s going on and he tells Esau to remember their deal but Esau doesn’t care, so Jacob and his mom take matters into their own hands. Esau had a beard, but Jacob didn’t, so he takes the hair of a sheep…”

“What's a sheep?”

“It was a kind of very hairy animal. Anyway, with the help of his mom he uses that hair to make a fake beard and goes with Isaac. Jacob fakes Esau’s voice and when Isaac touches his face he feels the beard…”

“Oh right Isaac was blind, right?”

“Yup, and Isaac blesses Jacob… of course it doesn’t take long for Esau and Isaac to find out they were fooled. Esau asks Isaac to bless him too but Isaac explains he can’t because he already gave the blessing to Jacob.”

“Wait, why can’t he bless Esau too?, you said he just has to say the words.”

“Isaac could bless Esau, sure, but that wouldn’t be a blessing from God, just a blessing from Isaac because he no longer had the blessing from God, he gave it to Jacob.”

“Like if the blessing was a solid object… so weird.”

“Then Jacob has to run for his life because Esau was going to kill him… and then there is this entire romantic subplot… he arrives at a town, he falls in love with a woman named Rachel but he and Rachel can’t get married because of some rules their society had… it’s a long story, in the end he finds a way to marry Rachel but he also has to marry her older sister Leah… I’m simplifying this story a lot you know?”

“It's fine, just get to the part were he wrecks that angel’s face, that sounds so hardcore.”

“Actually the angel wrecks him… Let me back up. He had this huge family, four wives, 11 children, and he wanted to go back to his country, but he gets news that his brother wants to kill him, so he sends his family away and stays alone… it’s not clear why…”

“Maybe Jacob wanted his brother to come for him and not his family.”

“You are probably right. Anyway the point is that he is alone in the middle of the night and then an angel appears. Everywhere else in the Bible when an angel appears, and I do mean every time, the first thing they say is ‘fear not’ or ‘be not afraid’ or something to that effect. But this time the angel doesn’t say anything, he just walks to Jacob and unsheathes a sword."

“God was angry because he stole the blessing.”

“I don’t know if ‘angry’ is the right word… The point is that Jacob unsheathes his own sword just in time to block the angel’s blow, and then he and the angel fought for hours. They fight the whole night, at some point the angel even stabs Jacob in the leg but he keeps on fighting… However it’s clear the angel is holding back. The sun is about to come out, Jacob is sweating, he’s gasping for air, and the angel tells him something like ‘Dude, just give up you can’t win’. But Jacob replies he won’t give up unless the angel blesses him.”

“The guy just goes around collecting blessings he shouldn’t have.”

“He really does. The angel blesses him and there is this thing God likes to do. He likes to change people’s names to mark important events, and he renamed Jacob 'Strong against God’ or in their language: Israel.”

“Wait, what?, that makes no sense…”

“We are here,” I interrupted here, pointing at the numbers marked on the walls. “The other door would be at the 2810 mark, right?.”

“Yeah, you are right, I got distracted by your story… so unprofessional on my part, please don’t tell Jun.”

I went down the forklift and I opened this new secret door same as the previous one, using ropes and suction cups. When I opened it I immediately was able to hear the sound of running water and many machines working.

Oakley drove the forklift inside while I continued on foot. This place was much darker than the armory. All we could see with the help of the lantern drone were strange buildings and tubes connecting them, but it was really hard to make any sense of it, like a maze.

“Hey Jacob,” said Segira touching my shoulder, but I wasn't expecting her so I jumped in fear. She laughed. 

“It's me, it’s fine.”

“You surprised me.”

“You knew we were supposed to be here, why are you surprised?”

“You appeared from behind out of nowhere… anyway, we have the pod.”

“Move it over there… Oakley, can you see where I’m pointing?”

“Yes,” Oakley replied and started moving forward very carefully. 

Sagira and I walked together.

“So this is where they clean the water of Jabru Station?,” I said to myself.

“Apparently,” Sagira confirmed.

Eventually we reached a sort of clearing in that forests of machines and tubes. Khalfan was already waiting there, sitting among a bunch of different tools perfectly ordered, but there were also other people there.

“Just in time,” Khalfan said when he saw us, “just leave the pod there. We’ll take it from here.”

“Who are those people?” I asked.

“You thought Sagira and I could disassemble and ship the pod by ourselves?,” Khalfan asked me. “We hired them with your money, they will help, and they can be trusted, don’t worry about that.”

“Yeah, you guys can leave now, we’ll have it form here,” Sagira told me and Oakley.

“There was one witness,” Oakley told them, “but Father Jacob bullshitted him into thinking we worked there, I don’t think he suspects much, but still, you should know. Also we knocked out two people using the forklift." 

“What!?, and they didn’t die?” Khalfan replied, he seemed to happy, like he wanted to know all the details.

“Correction,” Oakley replied “we didn’t use the forklift to knock out two people, we knocked out two people who were using the forklift. The timer may depend on when they wake up.”

“It’s fine Oakley, it should give us enough time anyway,” Sagira judged “good job tricking the witness Father Jacob.”

“Eighty percent of it was just wearing these orange vests really,” I explained. "You wear them and people believe anything.”

We left Khalfan, Sagira and their mechanics to work on the machine. They would disassemble it, place the parts in boxes, and send the boxes through the underground waterways, the so-called hidden Ea, so they would come to the surface at the waterfall where presumably Jun would be there to collect them and send them to a ship in the port. That ship would depart with the boxes and leave them for us to collect at another pirate base. That way when we left Jabru Station there would be no contraband in our ship, we would not be smuggling anything. We would leave the station as clean as when we came in.

Meanwhile me and Oakley went back to the secret tunnel, we found the place where we had entered and we came back out in Kiririsha forest with the spine still shinning bright and with nothing illegal in our persons.

We changed back into our regular clothes for the mission, the ones of tourists cosplaying to be tourists. We walked back through the forest and the meadows back to pitiful concrete slab that was Kiririsha station. There we waited for the next train going back to Jabru city, and that was it. Mission complete.

Chapter 6

It was weird to be sitting back in the train after everything we had just done. It felt too normal somehow. At the very next station the few people in the same wagon as us got off and suddenly it was just Oakley and me there.

“Come to think of it,” Oakley said, “we didn’t finish talking about Jacob and the Angel.”

“Oh yeah, where was I?”

“The angel agrees to bless Jacob and then gives him a new name, Israel, that you said translates as ‘Strong Against God.’”

“That's pretty much the end of the story. After that Esau forgives him and then one of Jacob's sons becomes the protagonist.”

“But… I’m confused, I mean,'strong against god'?, isn’t religion about obeying god?”

“To be honest this actually confused me too for a while, but this is how I see it. Jacob had initiative, determination, he valued the blessings... He didn’t care about the rules or how things were supposed to be. Over and over in the story he breaks the rules and tries to change the world to make it how he wants it to be… and I think God valued that.”

“I see what you mean. He steals his brother blessing, he steals Rachel… an angels comes to punish him but he makes the angel bless him instead.”

“Exactly. Jacob was not the chosen one but he chose to be the chosen one. I think that’s what God wanted. Up to that point all the chosen ones of God were blindly obedient, Abraham nearly sacrificed his own son to God…”

“What?!”

“Long story. The point is that I think God wanted a chosen one who would not obey blindly. I think God wanted someone ready to fight against his family, against his society, and even against God himself for what he knew was right… God wanted a chosen one who was strong, even against God.”

“Wow, he might have not killed an angel, but it is a pretty cool story… did… did your parents name you Jacobo because of this story?”

“I don’t know. I never asked them. I don’t think my parents even had a religion. I don’t remember them ever telling me anything about Jesus, Muhammed, Baháʼu’lláh, Krishna… nothing. But I must admit that when I began reading the Bible I was specially interested in Jacob’s story because he had my same name. I used to wonder if my parents knew this story and they chose my name because of it… I wanted to believe it connected me to them, to something I never knew about them.”

I don’t remember what we talked about the rest of the ride back. People came into the wagon, people came out… I like public transports like this because it allows you to see all kinds of people. At some point someone came in selling grilled cheese sandwiches and we bought two from her. They were delicious.

When we arrived back in the hotel it was already night time but the lights of the houses and the streets looping over our heads looked much like stars look like in your skies. We entered the hotel and we went back to our room. 

“So, what do we do now?” I asked Oakley as I took of my shoes.

“We just have to wait for the signal to meet back at the ship,” she explained and turned on the lights.

“About that…” Jun said, sitting in the bed. Oakley and I screamed.

I looked at him. He had a ton of bruises in his face and his arms, and I new he had more bruises in his torso. I couldn’t see them, but I know how you move when every movement hurts.

His hands were full of small cuts and a few burns. Overall, he just looked tired, exhausted even. I wanted to ask him what had he done or where he had been, but I knew he would not answer any of those questions. Oakley in the other hand was completely unfazed by all of this.

“Jun!, don’t hide like that!” she was furious.

“I wasn’t hiding, I was just sitting here waiting for you guys to come back, you guys just didn’t notice me… anyway, there’s a problem: they’ve got Sagira.”

“What?, how?” Oakley asked.

“That's what I’m trying to understand,” Jun replied, "She and Khalfan disassembled the pod, put the parts in the boxes and sent them through the waterways to me. The part are already on their way to our next stop. Everything was according to plan... but an hour ago she was detained at the train station. They tried to get Khalfan too but he got away. Because it was an emergency I got him in the same ship as the parts of the pod. He will wait for us at our rendezvous point. I want to know what happened. Did anyone see you?”

“Well, yes,” Oakley admitted, "We tricked a soldier into thinking we worked there, he even opened and closed the door for us. If he suspected something we would have been detained. He never saw Khalfan nor Sagira.”

“That couldn’t be the reason…” Jun replied, frustrated.

“What's the plan?” I asked.

“Well, the mission has to continue,” Jun decreed. "We can’t let this setback interfere with the contract. She’ll have to spend a while here in jail, but I’ll get her out when the mission is over, she’ll understand.”

“We have to leave now,” Oakley reminded us. “We don’t know why they were looking for her, so they may be looking for us too.”

“…No!, unacceptable, I have another solution,” I was nearly screaming.

“To help Sagira?” Jun asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Your contract will be fulfilled, don’t worry, you’ll get your money’s worth.”

“That's not it… she’s in jail because of me, I have to help her.”

“She knew the risks, she understands, she will be fine,” Jun assured me.

“I have to help her.” 

“Jacob, it’s fine,” Oakley assured me.

“I HAVE to, I don’t have a choice… it’s what Jesus would want me to do, that’s my law… and I know how to do it.”

Jun sighed.

“Father Jacob I cannot let you risk your own mission for sentimentality.”

"If I’m telling you I have a plan is because we can do it and get away with it, and we trust each other completely, utterly, do we not?”

“We do,” Jun admitted.

We called a car and I gave it an address. The car drove us away from the busy ring of buildings that formed the core of Jabru city. Instead the car went to the edges of the city were it finally found a dirt road and followed it into a forest. It seemed like the road was going nowhere but as we continued the road became much better, then we saw a house next to the road, then another, then the road split into several paths leading to more houses concealing among the trees.

“What is this place?,” Oakley asked me.

“This is where the really rich people of Jabru City live,” I explained.

Finally the car stopped in front of one of the houses. It was a small brick house with a low brick fence surrounding it. It had one of those roofs that are tilted in both directions, the kind of roof people use on Earth in places where it snows. Although of course in this case it was purely an aesthetic choice, there is no snow in Jabru City.

Between the house and the brick fence there was a a garden full of flowers and bushes and a few trees in the back.

We got off the car and walked to the gate in the fence. Apparently this was enough to wake up a dog sleeping on the porch. He came close and with little effort he stood up in that awkward way dogs sometimes do, using the fence as support. I went to pet him and he looked completely satisfied, his plan had worked.

Then the door opened and a man came out in his pajamas. It was Mister Acharya. He looked really shocked and surprised.

“J… Jacob… Father Jacob, what are you doing here?, and who are your friends?”

“I need your help Mister Acharya.”

“Sure, sure… come on in.”

We opened the gate and went into his house, with the dog close behind.

The house was full of frames with photos and paintings of people and places in Mr. Acharya’s life, along with a myriad of trinkets and books, some of them ordered in shelves, others in stacks around the house.

I liked that the walls and the furniture had dark colors, like brown, dark orange, wine red… it made it feel comfy somehow.

We sat in the living room and Mr. Acharya brought us an assortment of hot drinks like coffee and chocolate.

“Well, what’s happening?,” Mr. Acharya asked again.

“We need you to release a woman who was detained four hours ago in Kiririsha station,” Jun said, straight to the point.

Mr. Acharya didn’t reply to him but instead looked at me.

“Who are this man and this woman?”

“…I cannot say that Mister Acharya.”

"Heavens Jacob, what have you gotten yourself into?"

“Only good things sir,” Oakley replied.

Mr. Acharya looked at her deeply.

“You were near the refugee district the other day, right?,” he asked her, but Oakley didn’t reply.

“Please Mister Acharya, we really do need you to release this person,” I insisted.

He just looked at me, in silence.

“Please,” I insisted again.

"I did tell you not to be like Douglas, didn’t I? "

I twitched at the mention of his name, and to be honest, I twitched again remembering that and writing this.

“Yes,” I replied, it took me a moment to compose myself.  "And in exchange you’d help me, that was the deal, and I am keeping my part.”

Mr. Acharya thought for a while, in silence.

“Maybe he can’t get her released,” Jun thought out loud to put pressure on Mr. Acharya.

“Rest assured, if I gave the word, she would be released immediately… but for the same is reason it’s important for me to use that authority discretely, only when it’s truly important and useful… maybe I could make it so the charges would be dropped, maybe I can insist they arrested the wrong person…”

“That works for us,” Jun quickly replied.

“It will take a couple of days,” Mr. Acharya explained, “perhaps a week or two at the most.”

“We will wait,” Jun agreed but then there was an earthquake alarm.

Of course, in space stations like Jabru the word “earthquake" has a different meaning than here on Earth. Here they mean the tectonic plates are shifting, the surface of the Earth is changing its configuration slowly. In space it just means you hit something, but I guess the feeling is very similar in both situations.

The problem is that there are very few things in space large enough or fast enough to cause an earthquake in a structure as huge as Jabru Station.

“We are under attack,” Mr. Acharya said to himself.

“We are what?,” Jun asked but Mr. Acharya ignored him. Instead he stood up, took out his cellphone and started whispering furiously on it only stoping to hear voices whispering back. “We need to go, follow me.”

We went to his bedroom, then the floor opened to reveal a staircase. We went down and suddenly we were in the system of secret tunnels again. Conveniently there was even a car there in the tunnel, we were just waiting for Mr. Acharya.

“Come on Flash, come,” we hear him saying upstairs.

We went back up and I saw how he was struggling to get his dog to go down the stairs. I was just gonna carry him but then we finally felt the earthquake the alarm had prophesied and the dog ran away.

We went outside and I thought he had just jumped the fence and was somewhere in the forest by now, but Mr. Acharya knew his dog, he lifted a branch from a bush and indeed there he was, shaking. Grabbing him was a whole thing and to be honest it felt like a waste of time. The station was under attack and we were grabbing a dog who clearly didn’t want to be grabbed, but it would have been worse if someone had suggested to just leave the dog behind. I know that would have made Mr. Acharya pretty angry and he would have started ranting about how all life is sacred.

Finally we were back in the tunnels, Jun was carrying the dog (who kept shaking and crying), and we all got into the car.

“Please don’t tell anyone about these tunnels,” Mr. Acharya told us.

“Sure, but please tell us more,” Jun insisted, “you said we are being attacked?, by the UNUM ship that was nearby?”

“Not just that ship, an entire UNUM fleet… some general managed to gain control over a few military bases and now they think they are big enough to challenge us.”

“Are they?,” Oakley asked.

“Yes, but we already had previewed this, we have friends coming over… we just hoped they would arrive before UNUM tried anything. They were faster than us.”

“So… where are we going?,” I asked, “a bunker?, some kind of safe room?”

“A safe room for the government of Jabru Station… maybe I shouldn’t have brought you, but I couldn’t leave you there… I guess just… wait around with me until this crisis is over.”

After a few minutes the car stopped and one of the secret doors opened in the tunnel, revealing first a small parking lot with other cars already in it, but also a room full of sofas, screens, a bar, several tables… everything extremely luxurious and elegant. The room was already occupied by some 20 people who were sat a table.

“Mister Acharya, we were waiting for you,” an old woman said, “who are these people with you?”

“Um…” I don’t know what Mr. Acharya wanted to say, but Jun stepped to the front and did a military salute.

“Sargent Li form the 16th boarding division,” and when he said that he completely changed his voice and demeanor to be that of a loyal soldier and not a cunning mercenary. “My friends and I were having drinks in our off duty time when we heard the alarm. I knew we were close to Mr. Acharya’s house, so we decided to go protect him. If we are under attack there may be hostile agents infiltrated into the population.“

“Good thinking,” a councilman commented.

“A sargent?, I don’t remember meeting you before,” an old councilwoman said accusatorially.

“The honor is all mine,” Jun replied.

I looked at Oakley and he had also adopted the posture and attitude of a soldier in service, so I tried to do the same, but I don’t know how well I did.

“Please, standby,” Mr. Acharya told us, “while we talk about the situation, but remember everything you hear is classified.”

“Yessir!,” Jun screamed.

“Okay so here is the situation,” said the youngest of the council members, a woman around my age. “Someone managed to take control of seventeen UNUM rump states. By themselves they were little more than military bases, their resources did not compare with ours, but now they are working together, repairing their old ships using the resources they now share. As a result they have amassed a descent fleet, comparable to ours. As you all felt recently they managed to impact us with a round form their massdriver cannons. Our iron shield destroyed the main projectile before impact but the shrapnel still had enough momentum to cause the earthquake. Still, the hull integrity can only be threatened by direct impacts.”

“What about our friends?,” Mr. Acharya asked.

“Melchizedek said he is coming and that his fleet has been deployed,” the old councilwoman replied, “but I must insist that working with them is…”

“Necessary,” a councilman replied, “I understand Acharya in this matter, we need him. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Does the enemy suspect of our reinforcements?,” another councilman asked.

“Not as far as we know,” the young councilwoman asked, “we may even be able to execute a hammer and anvil maneuver…”

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Acharya decreed.

“We could exterminate the enemy forces,” she argued.

“Exactly. There’s at least a million people in the enemy fleet, we would kill at least half of that, and how many of our soldiers would die to perform this massacre?”

“This enemy will attack us again,” she said, getting angry.

“Unless we turn them into an ally,” Mr. Acharya insisted, no one wanted to keep arguing with him. “Why haven’t there been more earthquakes?”

“If I were to guess” another councilwoman said, “that attack was not ordered by whomever is commanding this fleet. The captain of that ship got excited and wanted to attack first, now they have been reprimanded and are falling in line… literally, the enemy fleet seems to to be entering some kind of formation… at any rate, this betrays they don’t have enough authority or that their soldiers lack discipline…”

“Let's move on to specifics,” Mr. Acharya decreed, "I want to know where every ship is positioned and what are they doing. Our main goal is to prevent any direct hits to the station.”

“Permission to speak,” Jun said, and I nearly started shaking. I had no idea what he had in mind.

“Permission granted,” Mr. Acharya replied.

“There is a person we suspect of being a foreign agent infiltrated into the station, she was arrested near Kiririsha forest.”

“Yes there is,” the young councilwoman said, “Apparently they were using the tunnels to steal weapons from the armory by pretending to work there. How do you know about this?”

“That's a very sensitive topic,” Mr. Acharya replied.

“Let me guess,” a councilman complained, “yet another military project only you have clearance to know about?”

“…Yes”

“This is bullshit!,” the councilman raged,” you are only a member of this Council, yet you get privileges like if you were the sole ruler of this nation!.”

“We can discuss that later Baci, for now let the Sargent speak.” Then Jun continued.

“We need custody of this prisoner… in fact, it would be best if you could erase any evidence that she was here in the first place. The enemy must not suspect we captured her.” Jun explained. I nearly burst out in laughter.

“Why do you need custody of her?,” the councilman apparently called Baci asked.

“There is information we could get from her which could be useful to defeat this invasion. I’m afraid I can’t say more at this time.”

The council members whispered among themselves and finally decided to put this to a vote.

“All in favor of allowing Sargent Li to take custody of this prisoner and erasing evidence of her arrest?,” the young councilwoman asked.

Nearly everyone raised their hands, and soon we were off.

Sagira told me how this experience was from her perspective.

When she was arrested they took her to the police station, but then they just left her in the car for around two hours, alone. Eventually it became night time and she started banging on the doors with her feet and her shoulders and screaming the word “lawyer”… and it worked, a lawyer came along to explain.

“The army wants you because they say you broke into one of their facilities,” she told Sagira.

“I didn’t, I was just taking a train without bothering anyone.”

“I’ll keep that in mind… the important things is that the police argues that since they captured you they have no reason to give you to the army. ”

“So?”

“So they will keep you here while they sort it out.”

“How long?”

“Maybe a couple of days…”

“Days?!, they are gonna keep me in a car for days?”

“By law no one can’t put you in a cell if they don’t have rightful custody of you as a prisoner.”

“So they are gonna keep me in a car?, it’s a shitty loophole. It’s just like keeping me in a cell but worse. You do see that, don’t you?"

“They will let you go to the bathroom and bring you food.”

“This is stupid. Why don’t they just do what the law says?”

“That's the problem, the law is unclear, your situation is unusual…”

“My situation is that I’m innocent.”

“Well, we can only start deciding that once we figure out who has custody of you…”

“So they only sent you to tell me why you can’t do anything?”

“…”

“Fuck off"

She continued to wait in the car for a couple hours more, trying to think of ways to take off the handcuffs binding her hands, or maybe grab her cellphone which was in an evidence bag on the driver’s seat, but the handcuffs were sending electrical signals to her nerves making it impossible to move her fingers. Then she heard an alarm. She looked through the window and she saw people coming in and out of the police station in a hurry, getting ready to scramble and answer the emergency.

“Hey!,” she screamed, but her voice was muffled by the car, “HEEEEEYYYYYY!” she screamed again and again banged on the door throwing her whole body to it.

Finally a young police officer opened the door.

“What?” he asked.

“W… what do you mean “what"?, I heard the alarm, what’s going on?.”

“An earthquake, we are gonna crash with something.”

“Well… take me somewhere safe.”

“We can’t take you away from the car.”

“Dude, this is dangerous, don’t you have to keep prisoners alive or something?”

“…”

“Right?”

“…we can’t move you from the car.”

“Dude, there’s an earthquake, what if I die?”

“I'm just following orders…” and he closed the door.

She waited there and she felt the earthquake come and go. It was nothing too serious, nothing like the earthquakes she experienced growing up, back when her family would scavenge the debris fields created by the recent battles. She told herself it was probably just a one off.

Except a while latter she saw something shining out of the corner of her eye. It was the screen in the dashboard displaying a message for all police officers but still secret to the rest of the people. She didn’t read the whole thing, just two words, that was enough: “…under attack…”

Her blood went cold with the memories of buildings tumbling around the cylinder of another space station, crashing everything in their path, sending other buildings tumbling as well… She remembered the lights form the spine failing, blinking, day and night running away form each other… birds flying in all directions, rats coming out of hiding, the sudden inescapable feeling that you were just in a thin tube in space and that any failure would mean your death.

She doesn’t remember if she was screaming to the top of her lungs, or if she was too scared, too trapped in her memories to actually scream, but then someone opened the door.

“Get off the car,” a police officer ordered her.

“What's going on?,” she asked. She feared the attack, but she also feared a trap from the police.

"Your charges were dropped... all of them... all I know is legally we can’t hold you… hurry!, we have to evacuate!”

The other officer was furious.

"This is fucking stupid and you know it. Something’s going on!, let’s leave her there and go coordinate the evacuation.”

Her partner was also very frustrated, but he was more resigned.

“Before evacuating we have to let her go. All I know is that if we leave her here without any reason we are gonna get in trouble, that’s the law.”

"It’s common sense!. This is some kind of mistake or something… we can’t waste time on this!”

"Mistake or not, according to the law, this is what we have to do now. It’s not our mistake. We are just following orders.”

Sagira couldn’t believe what she was hearing, she told me she even thought maybe the fear of the attack had sent her into a fugue state.

“Uncuff me,” she ordered them, “I can’t leave if you don’t uncuff me.”

Reluctantly one of the officers grabbed the metal tube binding her hands together. He closed his eyes and breathed calmly. The cuffs opened.

She then took her cellphone and started running, disappearing into the shadows of the night. She had completely decided not to stop running and we would not have reached her if she had not seen us waiting for her bellow a streetlamp in the corner of the street.

"One to tell at parties,” Jun said, smiling.

“W… h… how?,” she managed to ask.

“The art of bullshit and influence,” Jun explained, “now come we have to get to the ship.”

Only the army and the police knew about the incoming attack at that point. They were getting ready for the chaos that would follow when they finally gave the alarm and the city woke up, but in the meantime everything would work out as normal. We were very close to the train station so our plan was simply to walk there and take a train to the port and leave as soon as possible. We considered going to one of the shelters and staying there, but Jun convinced me it was not a good idea.

“It's just a matter of time before they connect you, Oakley and me to the theft of the armory, and since it happened just before an attack you know they are going to investigate it like crazy. If that happens I don’t think your friend Mahavira can help us, you saw how there are people in the Council just waiting for any excuse to get rid of him. If we leave now he can just argue we died or something.”

We were walking to the train station, it was right there we could see it, but then our cellphones vibrated. We had a notification:

“EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. All occupants of Jabru Station are ordered to head to the nearest shelter. Please foll…”

“Let's keep going,” Jun said.

Little by little the lights in all the buildings were turned on, but then the Spine and the Ribs began shinning again, illuminating the whole station and making it look like the middle of the day again. My eyes hurt because of the sudden change.

People started coming out of the buildings. Most were in their pajamas, and most were walking calmly, but a few people here and there were crying or running.

The crowd was growing, becoming denser, there were people bumping into me from every direction but it was still possible to walk through the crowd. But then, in one instant, the crowd changed, like a phase change form liquid to solid and I had no more space to myself. The crowd became a mass of unmoving people trying to get different places, and I was in the middle of it, touching all those people, and they were touching me. I don’t know how it happened so quickly, I don’t know where that many people came from.

The worst part is that I couldn’t see the other mercenaries anywhere.

“Jun!,” I screamed, “Jun!,” I was trying to jump over the crowd, and every time I jumped my feet landed on someone else’s feet, the space I was leaving had been immediately reclaimed. But then I saw him, not so far away, “even if we arrive there will be no more trains!,” I tried to tell him.

He replied something but I didn’t hear, then I noticed Sagira was holding his hand, and I saw Oakley too. I don’t know what they told me, but I just tried to follow them.

You had to be aggressive just to move slowly through that mass of bodies but then we felt another earthquake, and then another. I felt my phone vibrate again but I didn’t have to check the notification to know what it said: the station was officially under attack. It was much sooner than expected.

Of course this news made the crowd have a phase change yet again, it became liquid, more liquid than water. Everyone was running and screaming around us, and I was just adrift in a storm made of people. My biggest preoccupation was not to fall because I was sure the crowd would stomp me to death if I did. I mainly just stood in place. Faces and bodies were moving around me, crashing onto me and going away… I just covered my face and stood in place… then someone grabbed my hand, I opened by eyes, it was Oakley. She pulled me through the running and screaming people and somehow we made it out of that torrent of screaming humans into a small street.

For some reason the crowd was ignoring that narrow street, probably because it didn’t lead to any shelters, but maybe the crowd was not thinking too well at that moment, they just wanted to run to safety.

Finally we could speak, although we still had to scream to be heard over the noise of the footsteps and the screams.

“There are no more trains!,” I insisted.

“We'll use the tunnels!,” Jun explained, “I left a car in one of them nearby!.”

Yeah, we were openly talking about the tunnels, screaming about it, but we were sure no one was paying attention to us.

We waited, it felt like hours, but it was probably just a couple of minutes. By the end the crowd had finally crashed with the entrances to the shelters, creating long lines, shouting matches, babies crying… but it was possible to move again.

Jun took us to one of the buildings still left in ruins from the civil war. We entered through one of the broken windows. and there it was, not even particularly well hidden: a hatch.

We opened it and entered the tunnels. The car Jun had left there was barely a pair of couches with wheels. Extremely old and rusty, it didn’t even have a roof, but it was fast enough.

As we raced through the tunnels we kept feeling the bombardment hitting the station in regular intervals. That had to mean the enemy fleet was sending barrages of massdriver projectiles which the automated defense systems kept intercepting and destroying before they could hit the station. What we were feeling was just the shrapnel impacting the outer hull, it was basically harmless, but there was a limit to how many shots Jabru’s defenses could destroy, and there was a limit to how many shoots the enemy had, the question was just who would reach that limit first…

Chapter 7

We are all victims of war, but we are victims of different kinds of wars. You who stayed on Earth had to deal with the many machine armies fighting for supremacy, consuming everything on their path, like a natural disaster, always fearful of that unstoppable swarm, and being spared only by chance. I can’t imagine how horrible it was for you living in those times, or being born shortly after.

For us in space it was quite different, of course. Space battles are not like the battles you are used to. For one, they are slow, but don’t misunderstand me, there is no safety in slowness, just the illusion of it. 

The classic example is being inside a projectile cone. When you shoot at your enemy in space you don’t just shoot one projectile which may miss, you shoot many of them, and these projectiles can sense the position and movement of their target, they make calculations and in time they explode to form cones of projectiles which will grow in size as the projectiles travel.

Everything within the cone will be destroyed. You think you could just accelerate to move away form it, but you can’t. Your enemy knew how much your ship could possibly accelerate and if you were in range they shot in such a way you simply cannot outrun their projectiles. The simple fact they shot at you means you will be hit.

 Your best hope is to destroy a few of those projectiles before they hit you. It's like making a hole inside the cone of projectiles before it arrives, but what if you can’t do that?.

There are many stories of people trapped by projectile cones, crews of hundreds or thousands of people, knowing they will die in a few minutes. They spent those last moments writing poems, recording goodbyes for their families or friends, singing, eating, having sex… or killing each other, crying, sending messages of surrender to enemies who can’t save them, even if they wanted to, sending spiteful messages to their enemies, succumbing to the worst desires they kept hidden their entire lives… Either way it goes, it’s always tragic.

I had a friend, actually, when I was a teenager in a refugee camp, her name was Noreen. We were finally getting food and water regularly, life was getting better. She would save blankets for me, I would save orange juice for her. She stole books for me, I stole a pair of headphones for her. It was us against the world, and with her at my side I knew we could take it. One day she checked the messages in the blockchain and to her surprise someone had replied to her message looking for her parents. Her dad was in a comma in Mars. She took all the money she had saved and decided to go with him.

I tried to convince her to wait there, with me, until her father woke up, but she insisted on going, she was very happy. She had the fantasy that her father would wake up and the first thing he would see would be his daughter, alive and smiling in front of him. She left and I knew it would be a while before we saw each other again, but that we would see each other again, eventually.

A few days later I received a message form her. Her ship had been attacked by an abandoned defense system and they ended up in a cone. In her message she was crying, saying goodbye. I can’t imagine how she felt, she was just doing a simple trip, but then they told her her life would end in minutes… I can’t imagine how you feel when your expectations for your life are attacked like that. I haven’t heard that message in many years. I miss her.

I just imagine the projectiles piercing through the ship, like rain, crushing person after person as they do so, crushing Noreen, her brain being destroyed before she could feel any pain.

Other times death can be much quicker, and I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. I guess death is bad no matter how it comes… I’m talking about radiation.

Here when you hear about radiation and war you think of nuclear bombs, but nuclear bombs are not particularly dangerous in space. They are dangerous here because they turn air into a wall, what they call the shockwave, and the bomb sends this wall made of air crashing into everything around it at very high speeds, but in space there is no air.

When a nuclear bomb explodes in space it’s just a particularly high amount of radiation, and that’s exactly what spaceships are made to resist the most. But radiation has advantages over solid projectiles. One is that you can’t destroy radiation before it reaches you, the second one is that it’s fast, it moves at the speed of light or very close to it, and the third is how absolute it is.

A person can survive one or two bullet holes, in the same way a ship can survive a few direct impacts with massdriver projectiles. But no one can survive being burned alive form the inside out, neither people nor ships.

In fact military spaceships are basically like conical pyramids built around linear particle accelerators and surrounded by little thorns which are actually the gaussian guns of the massdriver system.

When in battle the ship will charge a circular accelerator they have near the base and when they are ready to attack they will send all that radiation to the linear accelerator and shoot. If they hit their enemy they have won. No shielding you put on a ship can ever protect you form that amount of gamma rays, it penetrates the ship, it melts the ship, it reaches every crew member, and it burns them all alive at the same time. It starts a few centimeters inside the body, under your skin, or in the bone marrow, and then it spreads out. Tissues like muscle or skin become charred pieces of carbon, liquids like blood simply boil away… in the end you are just left with a half melted piece of metal full of burnt pieces of carbon that used to be people. Nothing survives a direct hit of gamma rays.

The only saving grace is that it’s actually relatively easy to evade. The beam is highly focused and it’s often shot from a long distance away. Even light takes a few seconds to arrive so if you move just a few radians away the beam will miss you entirely.

For that reason massdrivers and particle beams are used in combination with each other.

You made a whole inside the projectile cone?, that’s where we will aim the particle beam, you want to move away form the particle beam?, you would enter a projectile cone. It’s all about denying your enemy places to move.

Or at least, that’s what I’ve learned about space battles by being exposed to them. I am not a soldier nor have I studied this subject in depth… and I hope you never do either.

Now you can better understand what was the situation for us and for Jabru Station in general.

Space Station are made to stay in orbit in one place, they are not made to move around. For that reason it was easy for the enemy to just cover the hole station in projectile cones and particle beams.

However Space Stations are oases of life in the vacuum of space. The only reason a place like that can exist in the first place is because they have tools prepared for any challenge, be it an accident, a natural disaster, or other people wanting to kill you.

In the case of an enemy attack the first tool Jabru Station had was of course its fleet, which no doubt was already deployed and fighting back.

The second tool was what we call an “Iron Shield”. It’s an automated system that detects the massdriver projectiles and destroys them by intercepting them with its own projectiles. Literally like stopping a bullet with another bullet. In this way the cone is destroyed entirely.

The third tool is a swarm of automated spaceships which are basically just thick metal shields. When they detect a particle beam these ships arrange themselves in a stack so that the beam has to go through the first shield, and the second one and the third one and so on.

The shielding of the station would never stop a particle beam, and it would be impossible to make a station with 100 times the shielding, but thanks to these ships you can have hundreds or thousands of shields, and often that is enough to weaken the particle beam enough to make it survivable. Although of course the shields end up melted and useless most of the time, so it’s a limited resource too.

And the fourth tool is just whatever allies you can find.

Our plan was to get to our ship and then leave first chance we got. Mr. Acharya had explained the enemy fleet was attacking only on the long side of the station, which meant the ports should be relatively safe. We hoped they wouldn’t bother with a small civilian ship and that we would be able to put Jabru Station in between us and the enemy fleet, thus being protected from any possible cones or beams.

I should have seen it coming but there were entrances to the secret tunnels even in the port. Once you knew about them and you knew how to unlock the doors you could move anywhere in the station without being seen… the problem was this last door.

“What do you mean you can’t open it?,” I asked Jun, and in retrospective, I was too harsh and angry, I was scared, but Jun was scared too and he didn’t loose his temper.

“I had to do a lot to deactivate the alarms of precisely the doors you guys would use during a very short window of time,” he explained, “this door was not on the list.”

“We can force it open,” Sagira suggested, surprisingly calmed.

“What about the alarms?,” Oakley reminded her.

“Fuck the alarms,” Sagira replied, “do you think they are gonna care for an alarm in the civilian port at a time like this?,” and when she said that we felt yet another earthquake.

“How much ammunition do those guys have?,” I wondered, “it's been like 20 minutes.”

“Those are pre-Silence levels of resources,“ Jun observed, “they really wanna take this place and they are risking it all in this one shot… but anyway, about opening that door…” he went to the trunk of his car and pulled out a blowtorch, a mechanical hammer, wrenches, screwdrivers, bottles of acid, regular hammers covered in blood…

“We can use the battery of the car to make a bomb,” Sagira suggested.

“That may actually make them care,” Jun observed, “they are gonna think we are infiltrated agents of this UNUM not-so-rump state.“

“Hmmm,” Sagira was thinking, “I don’t think the acid will work, the mechanical hammer could work but it takes too long.”

“Let's just smash the car on the door,” Oakley proposed.

There was no more discussion. We aligned the car, deactivated the collision system, and stepped away.

The car crashed on the door of the secret tunnel and bent it, creating a gap between it and the wall. We also heard screaming.

“What happened?, are you guys okay?,” said a man from the other side of the wall.

I felt so goddamned stupid in that moment. Of course there were other people in the port, we couldn’t be the only ones trying to leave the station… you see there is a law in most orbital cities, it comes from an UNUM law, it’s called “the right to leave”. Put simply it says that no one can stop you from leaving a space station, yes, even if there is a battle outside.

Now, if I was them I would have stayed in Jabru, it was the safest place by far, but I guess these people didn’t trust the Station that much and wanted to leave just in case it was conquered or destroyed.

“We are fine,” Oakley replied, “could you give us a hand to make the gap large enough for us to pass through?”

“Sure,” the main replied, there seemed to be a small group of people with him.

Together we used crowbars and other stuff as levers to make the gap larger and we were barely able to pass through. It would have been much easier if Kahlfan was there.

There didn’t seem to be many other people around, just the constant voice of the alarm begging us to go to a shelter.

“Are you all alright?,” the man asked us once we had all passed.

“Yes, thank you,” Jun said.

“What even is that place?,” he wondered while looking through the gap.

“Service tunnels,” Oakley assured him, “we were doing maintenance work when the attack started and it locked us in.”

“Pretty big flaw in the design…” the man said to himself.

“Are you guys also leaving?,” I asked him.

“Oh yeah of course,” said a woman in that man’s group, probably his wife or sister, they seemed close, “have you heard about the size of that fleet?, and it’s all pre-Silence, Jabru has no chance.”

“What I want to know is where was this fleet all this time?,” a young man asked, probably her oldest son?.

“It was there,” Jun replied, “scattered in a bunch of military bases whose leaders were always fighting to be the real Secretary General. I guess someone finally won.”

“Well, I’ve heard it was sent from the past!,” the young man replied, it was clear he was not interested in knowing the truth, just in making the present more exciting.

“Why are we waiting here?,” Sagira finally asked, angry.

“Oh, we are waiting for the elevator,” the man explained, “apparently they were automatically disabled and they expect us to use the stairs, can you believe it?, and our ship in near the axis… so Roger here is doing some… creative maintenance… to get the elevators working again.”

“Nearly done!,” a man said far away, he was kneeling on the ground in front of a whole he had made in the floor with a blowtorch. In his hands he had cables coming from the hole and he was cutting them and connecting them over and over. Sagira went over to help.

A few minutes later the elevator was indeed finally working and we all got inside. We could see a few other groups of people far in the distance also trying to make elevators work or even some crazy people using the stairs, I hope their ships were in the first few hundred meters.

The man started whistling and screaming to get those people attention, show them we had a working elevator, and  sure enough we got the attention of some of those groups and they started coming our way.

The man and his group, some 10 people, got off first because their ship was in a lower level, but he turned around and said:

“My name is Gemil, by the way, it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“The pleasure was all ours Mister Gemil, I wish you a safe trip,” Jun said.

“May God be with you,” I said, blessing him.

At last the elevator opened at our level and The Joke was right there.

“Fucking finally,” I said in celebration.

We got in and strapped into our seats.

“I hate Khalfan right now,” Jun said, “if we see him again I’m gonna be so angry at him for leaving early and not dealing with this shit.”

Sagira sent a request for the port door to be opened and sure enough soon we were being moved to the dark decompression chamber, a second door opened, and just like in Astoreth a mechanical arm moved us outside the station. That’s the moment we all looked out the window.

The white ships of the UNUM fleet were shinning, and each one was adorned with a crown of red hot gaussian guns. The massdriver projectiles formed an elegant dance of symmetry and alignment as they traveled through space, and the particle beams became visible as they pierced the stacks of shield ships, producing a mist of metallic vapors which refracted light in many beautiful ways.

Then the arm dropped us and we were falling. The flat wall of Jabru Station was just a blur of speed in front of us.

Then the wall was gone, and although we were still moving like before, it didn’t feel like we were falling anymore.

Sagira turned on the engine, she quickly positioned Jabru Station between us and the enemy fleet, and then she just started accelerating away. In the same way a projectile cone is inescapable if you are close enough to a military ship they are completely harmless if you are far enough away, and the same goes for particle beams.

Since we were accelerating away from Jabru Station the sensation we had was that Jabru and the battle were bellow us and that we were going up. As we kept climbing away form the battle we expected to see some military ships, that was expected.

What we didn’t expect was for so much of Jabru’s fleet to be behind the station too. We found ourselves amidst a swarm of military ships pointing down, attacking their enemies bellow.

 They were using the stations as a cover, the same way a human soldier may use a wall or a big rock for protection and only come out of cover briefly to shoot at the enemy and going back to cover before they could reply.

I also saw a couple of ships that functioned as automated repair stations for shield ships. They would arrive damaged, with holes melted through the middle, and they would leave whole again. I also saw other automated ships bringing debris from the battle and turning them into ammunition for massdrivers. All in all Jabru was ready to resist for a long time.

“How long till we are at a safe distance Sagira?,” Jun inquired.

“From the cones, about about an hour or two, three to be absolutely safe, from the beams… about four?, I mean, they would still be lethal but it gives us enough time to evade the radiation peak…”

“So it’s gonna be five long hours before we can even start heading towards the rendezvous point,” Jun concluded. “Might as well rest people, we did what we could, all that’s left is to rest… or we could play another round of War of the Ring…?”

There was generalized grunting from me and the women. Jun just laughed and left.

“What even is the next rendezvous point?,” I asked Oakley while we got off our seats and floated away, leaving Sagira to drive.

“It's another pirate station, Jasso."

“I thought Jasso had been abandoned.”

“It was, but a few years ago it started working again. I don’t know how they managed it.”

“Help from the Librarian Orders I think.“

We went to the kitchen and Jun prepared us a very well deserved meal of mexican mole and rice. Mexican mole is unrelated to those animals that ruin gardens in this planet, it’s actually chicken meat with a delicious sauce made with chocolate if you can believe that, but most importantly it’s dense enough to stick to the plate so you have no problem eating it in low gravity.

After all that I was supremely tired. We had been awake for around 28 hours. The breakfast we were having when Jun finally gave us the go ahead seemed like a scene from another lifetime. I was aching to fall unconscious in my bed… but then Sagira called us to the cabin.

“Calm down Sagira, I saved you mole, it’s in the fridge,” Jun said trying to get ahead to her anger.

“Not that… how do I explain this?… ummmm… well…” she seemed very insecure.

“Just say it,” Jun ordered her.

“We are about to arrive to Jasso Station,” she finally said.

“Uh?,” Oakley said, and she was speaking for all of us. We were too tired to understand what was going on.

“We were supposed to arrive in like… a day and a half, but we could arrive there in a couple of hours,” Sagira explained again.

“But how?,” I managed to ask.

“Well… Jasso station doesn’t seem to be right now where it was a few days ago when we planned this mission.”

“Are you saying…” Jun was choosing his words carefully, “that a Space Station moved?… like… moved to another orbit like a ship?.”

“…Yeah, and it is still moving according to the ship’s readings, look.”

She showed us the screen and we saw it. A huge spherical object surrounded by around a thousand ships was moving towards Jabru Station.

“Melchizedek…” I spoke before thinking, but then my thoughts caught up to me, “the council mentioned they asked someone named Melchizedek for help… maybe this is him… and the ships following Jasso are his fleet, ready to engage.”

“With this sign you shall conquer,” I said, blessing the station and ships I saw on screen, and then I finally went to sleep.

I was asleep for must of the battle, but I’ve heard many stories about it over the years.

The UNUM fleet was around evenly matched with Jabru’s fleet. Jabru had more ships, but UNUM had better ones.

Apparently the UNUM rump state was ready to risk it all in a head on battle, but Jabru went for the safer approach of making it a trench battle. Jabru Station itself was their impregnable fortress. What they didn’t know is that both sides were just making time, stalling, until they could execute their plans.

The Citizen Council had seen how the warring military bases suddenly started working together and they had sought an ally. They found that ally in Melchizedek, a leader who had managed to repair Jasso Station and make it operational again. In doing so Melchizedek had become the master of a city, an entire nation, it just needed people now. For that reason he had been welcoming all sorts of people, including pirates, with the added benefit that they came with their own warships.

Upon learning that Jasso Station could move the Citizen Council had devised a plan in which, when attacked, they would avoid a direct confrontation and instead just make time until Jasso Station and their fleet could arrive to help them and flank the enemy.  At that moment the Jabru fleet would change strategy and begin a direct confrontation. Being attacking on both sides the enemy fleet would suffer heavy damage before they could retreat, and they would not be a threat ever again.

However the leader of the UNUM rump state had had a similar idea. Turns out that each military base had many severely damaged ships in addition to the few ships they still used. No one had seen the damaged ships in decades so no one considered them as part of their strength.

They had used the most heavily damaged ships as spare parts to repair the others, in a sense doubling their strength. Then they took the ships with the best cloaking systems and they were sent apart from the main fleet to the opposite side of Jabru Station.

The idea was that they would attack Jabru Station with the goal to conquer it and make it their base of operations for future conquests. To do this they needed to get rid of Jabru’s fleet.

If Jabru decided to accept their challenge of a head on battle or if they used their station as a fortress it didn’t matter, either way the rest of the UNUM fleet would be hiding behind and they would only reveal their presence when Jabru’s fleet was well withing their range. In this way they would attack Jabru in two fronts, and obliterate their fleet.

One problem in this plan, as you have probably already deduced, is that by moving away from the battle we were actually moving towards the hidden detachment of the UNUM fleet, hidden by their military technology.

Another problem, at least for Jabru Station, was that as soon as the UNUM rump state saw a second fleet and a fucking SPACE STATION moving in their direction they could disengage and retreat before they were flanked, but of course they didn’t, and that should have been the first warning.

The UNUM fleet keep fighting even as they started being attacked on two fronts. I am told they adopted a triangular formation along the plane formed by them and the two stations. Two sides of the triangle were each facing one of the stations and the third one was formed by reserve forces which is the definition of a power move. If you are being attacked by two enemies at the same time and your reaction is to tell some of your forces to stand back and not fight… at the very least you have confidence.

It must have been around that time when I dreamt I was falling. I was about to crash with an infinite staircase which was going down no matter which direction you were going. I woke up just before I crashed and died in my dream just to find myself falling in one direction, hitting the wall and then falling in another… in space you usually tie yourself to your bed but I forgot.

I grabbed onto one of the handles in the walls but my body kept being swung around by the sudden and drastic switches in gravity as we accelerate in one direction or another.

I thought we were about to die in that moment. I thought we had been hit by a stray massdriver projectile and that had sent us spinning or something, giving us more rotational momentum than the ship could ever compensate for. Or I don’t know, whatever was happening I was sure we were about to die. I wasn’t a stranger to this feeling. I wasn’t so much scared or sad as I was disappointed. There were so many things I was living for but now none of them would happen, like a movie that ends when it’s just getting good.

However I kept not dying and decided to try to find out what was going on. Fortunately the handles were close enough that I could use them to “climb" towards the cabin, and I say “climb" with quotes because since the acceleration was changing so much sometimes I was going down or to the sides. At some point I saw Jun and Oakley also trying to reach the cabin from the levels bellow.

Finally I reached the cabin and I saw Sagira violently desperately piloting the ship… I wanted to ask what was going on, but I also didn’t want to distract her.

I crawled up to my seat and strapped myself to it. I looked at the screen and I saw it: a huge UNUM fleet had revealed itself in the previously void space we were going towards.

This fleet had begun shooting at the Jabru fleet taking cover behind Jabru Station, filling a huge volume of space with massdriver cones and particle beams.

However none of those attacks were aimed at us but to the warships. For this reason the ship’s primitive A.I. and Sagira were desperately trying to calculate or find a safe path out of that now deadly place.

This was extremely hard because it wasn’t like we were flying through a mayhem of projectiles or beams, those still were far away. Rather Sagira wanted to avoid the places those thing would be in the future…

Then I saw how Sagira wasn’t looking out of the window but rather she had positioned her screen in front of her… the screen had an option for augmented reality, and when I did the same the computer showed me space divided in several red sections. If we entered any of those red sections then no matter how much we accelerated we would not escape one of the many attacks the new UNUM fleet was making. That’s why Sagira was moving the ship so violently. She was trying to avoid the red sections that already existed and the new ones being created by the new attacks the fleet kept making.

I just waited in my seat, trying not to throw up, and waiting for Jun and Oakley who eventually also entered the cabin and strapped themselves to their seats too.

“Get us behind Jasso!,” Jun screamed.

“That’s all I’ve been trying to do,” Sagira replied, and the calmness in her voice was surprisingly out of place, but I guess that was part of why she was even able to function in this situation.

As we kept running away for dear life we reached the point when Jabru Station was no longer in between us and the UNUM fleet and we could see it and the battle it in all its might.

Pieces of metal and gas glowed red and blue, at times the barrages of massdriver projectiles would align in such a way that we could see them as a geometric pattern, just to disappear in the darkness the next instant. I saw a ship explode, an entire ship, thousands of people, thousands of lives, ended just like that, and yet it was nothing in the magnitude of that battle.

At that point I was finally able to take a better look at Jasso Station, even if we were being violently swung around it didn’t leave my view. It had been carved out of a huge roughly spherical asteroid, it was rotating to generate gravity, just like Jabru or Astoreth, but out of the poles in its axis of rotation came two structures I had never seen, that was probably what allowed the station to move.

But as it turned I saw another thing, some kind of metallic spire was coming out of Jasso, and just as I recognized it as a particle accelerator it shot the most powerful beam I had ever seen. Remember our ship had actual windows?, well we all got sun burnt simply by the afterglow of that attack, despite the fact we were thousands of kilometers away.

Of course it’s hard to see a particle beam in space until it crashes onto something, and we definitely saw it. Suddenly one of the largest ships in the UNUM fleet had a fucking hole going through it and many other smaller ships around it seemed… lifeless somehow. Either their electronics had been destroyed by the radiation of simply being near the beam, of the people inside had been burn despite it not being a direct shot.

Humanity had never seen such effective weapons but once.

There was no time to think about that because now the UNUM fleet had finally decided to retreat and Jabru’s fleet broke formation in order to pursue and destroy as many ships as possible. This was a process that would take many hours. A slow-motion chase.

You’d think that was good for us, but it actually got a little bit worse.

Remember that the UNUM fleet was split in two. The front section, the one everyone saw first, was retreating without breaking formation. But the back section, the one that was hiding to attack Jabru’s fleet form behind, well, they were doing quite well. Jabru would have certainly lost if Jasso station didn’t come out to help.

However now that they could see the front section retreating the back section were in a predicament. They could retreat the same way they had come before, but if they did they would be alone, far from their bases and the rest of their army. Even if they waited a few days and tried to go around and join with the rest of the fleet Jabru and Jasso could sent scouts to find them and attack them before the main fleet could help them.

In other words, they had to join with the main fleet now or be lost forever.

The reason this was bad for us is because to join with the rest of their fleet they would have to pass in between Jasso and Jabru, which was exactly were we were.

Still, this mad rush and escape would take several hours. We thought all we had to do was simply to get out of the way, let them run away for all I care… Actually I did care, this was the outcome in which the fewest people died.

It took us like half and hour to get clear of any red sections. Finally without any crazy changes in acceleration we had some descent gravity pointing to the goddamned floor. We had Jasso and Jabru up and our enemies bellow, it felt right. 

As we continued going towards Jasso Station we started detecting many other civilian ships climbing with us. They had the same idea of putting Jabru between themselves and the enemy fleet just to be surprised by the hidden detachment. Understandably they had reacted in the same way and headed towards Jasso since there were still many projectiles inbound to Jabru.

Sadly our ship also detected many civilian ships not moving nor accelerating. Those were probably the people who got trapped in red sections, dead people who were simply waiting to die.

After some fifteen minutes many of the ships from the second detachment had come a lot closer to the small swarm of civilian ships going towards Jasso. They were much larger ships and yet they could accelerate faster than us. That goes to show just how powerful were the ships built by the nations of Earth.

Then those ships released their “wasps.” That’s how we call small individual warships, like war airplanes here in Earth.

It made no sense to be seeing them now. Wasps are only deployed when two ships are fighting in close proximity or for skirmishes or recognisance or to protect boarding parties… but why deploy them when you are running away?.

We never imagined those pre-Silence wasps had even higher accelerations. Soon they had reached the swarm of civilian ships and a while later they had even gotten ahead of us. We knew this was bad, we knew we should be worried, we just didn’t understand of what.

We didn’t have to wonder too long, because some 30 minutes later they had deployed their nets.

I had seen those nets used once or twice in my life. These re relics, technology developed in the last days of the UNUM regime, a way to stop some ships without destroying them.

They look like a huge piece of thin paper or fabric, lined by small robots which deploy the net and keep it in place.

When a ship collides with the net at first nothing seems to happen. The net simply stretches as the ship continues to move. But then the ship starts decelerating because this material is basically indestructible, or rather, it uses the kinetic energy of the collision to rebuild itself… I don’t understand it very well, I didn’t go to school, but even if I had I wouldn’t understand it. I think all the people who understood it died when I was just a kid.

This material converts some of the kinetic energy into electricity and it creates a magnetic field that decelerates the ship even more, in fact the more you try to accelerate the stronger this induction becomes. Finally when this material is deformed enough it creates a strong electromagnetic pulse that turns off everything inside the ship. It’s quite inescapable.

And these wasps were deploying nets all over the place, in front of us and to the sides. Some of the civilian ships were already steering away but other wasps were already getting ahead of them and deploying nets there.

“What are these mutherfuckers planning,” Jun asked, but only to himself.

“Jun I don’t think we have the capabilities to avoid them,” Sagira informed us, and for once she didn’t sound angry or calmed, but almost ashamed.

Then I remembered, there it was, in the dashboard along with all of Sagira’s toys: the Jousting Knight.

“Let's make the ship spin!,” I screamed, pointing at the Jousting Knight, “by the Dzhanibekov effect we will turn us around!. They are not placing nets behind us.”

“That only works if the spinning object is unbalanced,” Sagira informed me.

“Let's unbalance it!… throw all the water away, all the extra air… all the mass we do not need.”

“It won’t be enough…” Sagira said.

“How long do we have?,” I asked, already strapping off of my seat, “let's move as much cargo as we can.”

“They are some 20 minutes ahead…” Sagira informed us." I’ll start decelerating, that’ll get us some 20 minutes more but the gravity…”

“We'll deal with it,” Jun replied, “leave it to us.”

“I'll start spinning then…”

Jun, Oakley and I were going down when we started to feel the gravity pushing us to the sides.

“From now on, think of down like a spiral,” Jun ordered us. "If you keep moving with the spiral you won’t fall.”

He was right, except that there now was also the gravity from the deceleration so it was like if the spiral was tilted and we were going uphill.

It would have been impossible to move any of the cargo for ourselves, but we didn’t have to. We just went around manually opening all the doors in every room. He had to run through the spiral until the door was in front of us, or at out feet, and be quick because if we held on to it soon we would be hanging upside down. Once opened we just the spiral do the rest. 

Soon I could hear the crates of food tumbling as they moved down, wherever it was at the moment, along with the cooking pans, training weights, batteries, computer parts, crates full of weapons, crates of medical supplies and crates full of raw materials for printers. The only room we didn’t open was Jun’s because that’s were all his boardgames were.

“They don’t have any significant mass,” was his explanation.

“Tee minus 3 for the net!,” Sagira screamed.

We ran down the hill of stuff we had created with the world still spinning around us. We somehow made it back into the cabin and strapped back into our seats.

“Did it work?,” I asked, “is the ship unbalanced enough to trigger the flip?.”

“I don’t know,” Sagira confessed.

We were approaching one of the nets but then physics did its part.

That has been one of the most disorienting experiences of my life, even more than when we were escaping the red zones or recently when the ship was spinning. I guess the only way I can describe it is like if you are in a chair and you push yourself backwards a little too much and you start falling, but then you never hit the ground. You flip around but somehow you are falling but in another direction and then another…  If there were ever miracles, the fact none of us threw up during all of this is one of them.

What’s important is that the ship flipped, it did a one eighty and now we were facing away form the net. Immediately Sagira cancelled the rotational motioned and she accelerated, getting us far away form the nets. I looked at Oakley and Jun, we were so happy to have pulled it off. Jun specially was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and respect…

But then another of the wasps put a net right in front of us. Before we could react we were already on it, and although I knew in detail how they stop ships no one told me how sudden it is. It’s like crashing with a wall that has the exact shape of your ship. Maybe it was was designed to not damage the ship too much but you still feel like your ship crashed against a wall.

You feel all the inertia, you feel the shock, you feel the cabin filling up with Shock Foam, and at least in my case, you loose consciousness because of the impact.

Chapter 8

I didn’t want to wake up. I was so tired, but when I finally did all the events of the previous day flooded into my mind. Having our breakfast interrupted by the go-ahead signal. Knocking unconscious those two guards. Stealing, lying. Sagira being arrested. Begging Mr. Acharya for help, lying to the Citizen Council. The earthquakes, the thought of the incoming attack. The crowd suffocating me. Escaping Jabru Station, glimpses of the battle, the fear we would end up sentenced to death by projectiles far away from us. The idea of spending those last minutes knowing my future, what would I have done?, would I have prayed?, would I have been at peace?. The feeling of waste and disappointment that comes when you think you might die. The knowledge thousands of people had died that day, the thought that each of those people was a baby that a woman carried for nine months. Their parents, their families, their friends, their lives, growing up, joining the army, going to that battle, dying. The fear of being captured the knowledge we had been captured.

I wish our bodies had other kinds of responses to such transcendental emotions, but I could only cry.

I tightened my first and I felt them full of something. It was hard to open my eyes, but that was because there was something covering them. I brushed it aside with my arms and I could see myself covered in Shock Foam.

Thankfully none of you here are unlucky enough to have been in a spaceship crash, so you don’t know about Shock Foam. Normally it would be impossible to survive any kind of crash involving a spaceship. They are simply too fast and we are simply too fragile. That’s why long ago people invented Shock Foam. When the ship's measurements indicate it is going to crash and there’s no way to avoid it the ship releases this substance. It is a liquid when it’s stored but as soon as you release it a chemical reaction starts and it creates a sort of pink foam. 

This foam has the beautiful property of being a non-newtonian fluid but only under absurdly strong forces and only in a gradual way. Imagine that a person in a spaceship is surrounded by this foam and then they crash. The person moves in one direction but they do so at a huge acceleration because of the crash. This triggers a change in the foam and slowly but firmly it turns into a solid. This way the acceleration the person experiences is not the one of the crash but the one of foam, and this acceleration is survivable, if painful.

I tried to look around me but my eyes hurt too much. I could see there was a ton of pink foam in the floor, and I could see both my feet and my hands were cuffed. I sat on the floor and little by little I could recognize my surroundings.

I were in a room with metal walls, a metal roof and a metal floor. Only one wall was not made of metal but it was actually transparent, made of the same kind of polymer used for the windows of old spaceships. Looking through that wall we could see only a featureless dim hallway. Finally there was a door, or rather, a metal frame in the shape of a door incrusted in the transparent wall, but there was no way to tamper with it.

This had to be a cell of some kind, and I wasn’t the only one here. I could recognize all my crew, still unconscious and covered in foam. There was also a group of people I didn’t recognize at first.

“Jun,” I said, “are you alright?.”

Jun growled.

“For fucks sake,” Sagira replied when saw her handcuffs and apparently tried to go back to sleep.

“Deny everything Jacob,” Oakley suggested me, her voice muffled by the foam she was under. She was also struggling to open her eyes, “deny everything.”

“We were not arrested in Jabru, it was UNUM, remember?.”

“Just don’t talk, stitches get… you know, that thing.”

Then one of those other people started moving under the pink foam. I removed some of the foam off of him and helped him to sit up.

I noticed he looked familiar under all that foam and only then I realized he was the same man we had seen when leaving Jabru’s port.

“It's okay, you don’t seem hurt,” I explained, “we were captured by UNUM.”

“Captured!…” he wanted to say something, but he was too disoriented. He looked around and started to get worried. “Sa… Sarrat and Masdra…!” he said those names and looked at me, as if that was enough to understand him, but I could see the preoccupation in his eyes and I understood what he meant.

“They are here.”

“Whe…” he continued to look around, confused, worried.

“Under the foam, look.”

I moved a little and started to scoop the foam from another lump. At first I got worried thinking that maybe there wasn’t a person bellow that stuff after all. But soon a leg was revealed.

“See, theres someone here,” then I moved to where I thought the face should be and continued scooping the foam, and sure enough I found it. “Look, here, is this who you were looking for?.”

He tried to stand up but he fell, not realizing his feet were cuffed too, so he dragged himself to my side.

“Ninsar… she’s fine.”

“Everyone else from your group must be here, it’s just that they didn’t bother to take the foam off of us and it continued expanding. But the important thing is that if you are okay then everyone else in your group must bee too.”

“Yes… tank you…”

He sat down and pressed his eyes like if he was trying really hard to stay awake. Then he lowered his head and growled.

“Everything hurts,” he told me.

“I know. When you crash like that your internal organs keep moving for and instant before crashing with your bones and muscles. My eyes hurt the worst right now. But trust me, it’s just the pain, it goes away.”

“Have you… ummm… cr… crashed before?.”

“I did, twice.”

“And have you ever been captured before?,” the sadness in his voice and eyes when he said that. It was unbearable.

“No but… we are civilians, we are of no use to them. They have no reason to hold us.”

“I hope so… hey… you are the guys from the port… the ones from the elevator.”

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“That's why…” Sagira said, still lying in a puddle of foam, “…that’s why in Astoreth they say ‘may we never see each other again.’”

“It's a good saying,” Gemil admitted.

We waited there a couple of hours as our bodies continued to ache. Eventually everyone managed to wake up and overcome the confusion and pain that comes from waking up from a crash.

Sagira was crying, but she wasn’t saying anything. I think it was because of her ship, The Joke. She was afraid to loose it.

Oakley was just sitting in a corner, alone with her thoughts, keeping her head down. I don’t know what she was thinking but she was either dealing with her frustration or planning her vengeance.

Jun was meditating, it looked deep, I didn’t want to disturb him.

Gemil and his group were also waking up slowly. Several people in his group were crying and he was trying to assure them everything would be alright.

“By the Law of Geneva they can’t hurt us,” he told them, “right?,” he asked turning to me, “you know that guy named Geneva and the law she wrote?.”

“Oh, yeah,” I replied, “the Geneva Convention was a part of Earth’s constitution… I think… but yeah, it dictated the Laws of War.”

“Laws of War?,” a woman asked, the one I had guessed correctly was Gemil’s wife back at the port. Her name was Sarrat.

“It’s crazy but they had laws for war,” I explained, “and people really did follow them. You are right Gemil, if anyone cares about the Geneva Convention is these guys.”

Then the children started waking up and started crying, loudly. I can’t blame them, and of course Gemil and his group were trying everything to calm them down.

I tried to remember how I felt as a child when I was in prison. Sitting in cells surrounded by strangers. Everyone being quiet and sad. I tried to remember how scared and confused I was.

However this was different. Only me and the other mercenaries belonged there, but Gemil and his group were a family. They knew each other, they loved each other. I didn’t want them to sit in silence and fear, waiting for hours on end.

One thing I’ve learned about being in prison is that people either get very talkative or not talkative at all. The “what are you in for?” ice breaker really does happen. Of course in this case no one knew why we had been captured, but I thought I should try that question anyway.

One of the children, a boy, perhaps eleven or ten years old, was just sitting there, breathing heavily, containing his tears, so I moved towards him.

“Hey,” I said, pretending to be very tough and serious, “what are you in for?.”

“I… don’t know… we didn’t…!”

I cut him off before he started screaming and crying again.

“I’m here because when I put on my shoes I go sock shoe, sock shoe, instead of sock sock shoe shoe,” and I played it super seriously, like if it was a real crime.

The child was so confused he stopped crying.

“That's not bad…”

“Oh, so you are a badass too, I like you. You probably did something horrible, like putting the milk first when you eat cereal.”

“I do that,” a girl nearby replied.

“A whole family of tough guys then,” I said, approvingly.

Then Sarrat got my game.

“I know why they got us,” she said, “they heard I clip my fingers with a knife instead of a nail-clipper and they just couldn’t allow us to go free. I’m so sorry everyone.”

“No mom!, of curse it wasn’t that!,” the little girl said.

“Yes it was,” I replied, “even I have heard stories of the woman who uses a knife instead of a nail-clipper, I just didn’t believe they were true!.”

“No!, that’s not it!,” the girl said, smiling for just a second.

Soon most of the other adults had gotten my game and they were insisting he had been captured for any silly reason they could think of. Bending pages on books instead of using book-markers, eating buggers, coding in java-script… you get the idea. All for the amusement of the children. And it worked, kinda, we were all still sad and scared, but at least we were not crying anymore, except Sagira.

I sat next to the wall and I continued watching Gemil as he directed the children to collect enough shock foam to make something like a snowman. It was nice. I like watching happy people be happy.

Then Sarrat came to sit next to me.

“Thanks,” she told me.

“You are welcome.”

“How did you know it would work?.”

“I didn’t, it could have backfired, but something I learned when I’ve been in prison is that trying to deny your reality is the worst thing you can do. That’s why people often try to talk about why they were arrested or captured. I knew the children needed to accept the situation and I just tried to find a way to make that conversation a little less scary.”

“You have a lot of experience being in prison?.”

“Too much experience.”

“You seem like a nice person.”

“I am, most people I’ve shared cells were.”

Then we had an awkward silence, which she broke.

“Had you ever seen such a fleet?”

“Mars has twice that many ships,” I reminded her, "but I had never seen that many ships in battle. So many people died…”

“It's so crazy… All my life I always thought of UNUM generals like sad bitter people who couldn’t accept they didn’t have authority anymore. They would send messages to my station demanding we pay taxes and we would just ignore them. We weren’t scared of them.”

“Well,” said a young man sitting nearby, “I’m pretty fucking scared now.” That was her oldest son, Masdra. He was shaking. “I saw the propaganda they broadcasted when we arrived at Jabru. It says we are all rebels, that we are sentenced…” he looked at the children and decided to whisper, “…that we are all sentenced to death, but they will forgive anyone who works for them. We will have no other choice.”

I sighed. To be honest I thought I would rather die than to work for such people, but I couldn’t blame him for wanting to live.

I looked at the mercenaries. They were scattered around the room, silent, lost in their own thoughts but I could feel they together somehow, united in their silence. They really did trust each other completely, utterly.

“All I can tell you is that organizations that coerce people like that don’t last very long. If you have to, work with them, kneel in front of whomever you have to kneel, but wait for your chance to run away, and take it.”

We were silent for a moment after that.

“Hey!, I see you’ve met my wife,” Gemil said while coming to sit next to us. Then he talked to Sarrat, “these are the same guys we met back in Jabru, from the elevator, remember?.”

“Oh yeah!,” she replied, “how did I not see it?.”

“And this is my son Masdra, and that one over there is my daughter Sisiram.”

“What about everyone else?, your siblings and their children?.”

“Well, yes and no.” Gemil explained, "Hazi is Sarrat’s sister and Leif is her cousin, but Sirna and Dasis started traveling with us long before they fell in love with Leif and Ninsar… Ninsar is Hazi’s daughter.”

“Too many names, I’m not gonna remember them all,” I had to say that in order to have deniability in the future when I inevitably messed up someone’s name.

“I guess we are a tribe,” Gemil summarized with a sense of pride. “A tribe of friends we made along the way.”

“And what were you doing in Jabru?.”

“Well, it’s a long story,” Gemil warned me.

“I can make it short,” Sarrat assured me. “We want to join one of the nomadic swarms leaving the Solar System, they are peaceful, children go to school, sick people are cared for…”

“You don’t have to run away from battles…” I added.

“Exactly,” Sarrat continued. "Although we have to do it now. Every second the swarms gets farther away, one day they’ll be unreachable. But before we get there Gemil wanted us to see grass and open spaces one last time, that’s why we were in Jabru, and we did enjoy it, a lot,” and she said that last part she looked lovingly at her husband and they tried to hold each other’s hand, but the cuffs made it difficult.

Me and Sarrat talked for a while about everything and nothing. The attack, Jabru, that gun Jasso Station had fired… but then another woman from Gemil’s group approached us.

“Hi,” she said, “I'm Ninsar.”

“Nice to meet you Ninsar, I’m Jacobo but everyone calls me Jacob.”

“Your friends seem…”

“They are getting ready,” I explained.

“For what?.”

“I’m not sure, but they’ll be ready.”

“Ah, okay… what about you?.”

“I’m a priest.”

“A christian priest?,” Sarrat was incredulous.

“I meant if you were getting ready too,” Ninsar clarified, “but are you really a christian priest?.”

“…ah, well… yes… yeah… I am,” I got very nervous but we were all nervous so I thought they'd just ignore it.

“That's great, I’m a christian too,” Ninsar told me.

“Oh!… you are.”

“Yes!, and so is my boyfriend. Dasis!, come!, this guys is actually a priest!, for real!.”

The man named Dasis dragged himself over the floor. It wasn’t just that his feet were cuffed, if I remember correctly he had an implant in his spine allowing him to walk but the cuffs deactivated all implants by default.

“Hi,” I said.

“He is Father Jacob, he is actually a priest!,” Ninsar explained, and when she did Dasis’ expression changed.

“A priest?, for real?”, he asked, both to Ninsar and to me.

It was happening again. Everywhere I went I found at least a few christians and the same thing happened over and over. Why did I keep lying?. I had to control my breathing.

“Yes, I am,” I told him.

The young couple looked at each other, and they smiled. The brightest most sincere smile I had seen in years. It made me want to be in love. In their smile there was mutual understanding, trust… a feeling that your soul walks along with another in a way I had never felt at that point, but that I could recognize as one of the cores of being human. Without speaking, they agreed and they talked at the same time.

“Would you marry us?,” they asked me. Their faces in that moment are burned into my memory. I had never seen such genuine joy in a prison, and very few times outside of it.

“Of course I would…” I replied, “but I don’t think we can do it here.”

Their smiles faded, just a little.

“Oh, well,” Ninsar was considering it, looking around. “Yeah it’s not what I imagined.”

“But you would?,” Dasis insisted, “some other time?.”

“If we meet again after all of this is over… yeah,” I told them. “If not I’m sure you can find another priest. There are a few of us around, I could give your the contacts of a few priests I know… depending on how this whole thing goes, of course.”

“Thank you,” Ninsar told me, and her honesty pierced through my fucking soul.

A while later we heard heavy footsteps coming closer. Looking through the transparent wall we could see the people in the other side as they approached.

They were soldiers wearing beautiful uniforms of white and navy blue. They didn’t look like they had just been in battle. There were no wrinkles in their clothes, their hair shined like one uniform surface, and their postures were just perfect.

Amidst the soldiers there was their leader. A woman dressed in a similar version to that uniform, but different, superior somehow. She even had a cape, and that block of medals soldiers like to have in their chest.

She stood in front of the cell, looking at us. The children were making shapes with the foam, but not anymore, they were frozen in fear.

When I saw her I knew she had come for me, because I recognized her.

“Father Jacob, even under these circumstances it’s a pleasure to see you again,” Enasir said. She was the woman I had met back in Astoreth.

Jun opened his eyes. He was supremely calm.

“You know her?.”

“We met in Astoreth when I was having lunch,” I explained, “I never imagined…”

“Well of course not,” she interrupted me, “I was undercover there. Buying parts to repair some our ships. Getting ready for the battle.”

I didn’t know what to say, but then Gemil looked at me, trying to communicate directly with my mind.

“By the Geneva Convention you can’t capture civilians in a war,” I finally said.

“Not exactly, but even if that was the case, the Geneva Conventions only apply to conflicts between signatory states or at the very least states that abide by the rules of the Conventions. The rebel controlled stations are neither signatories not have we seen them abiding by the Conventions. Thus they do not apply.”

I was speechless, I wanted to disagree but I couldn’t think of how. I didn’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. Then Enasir laughed.

“But don’t worry. We will still respect your human rights. We shall not be cruel. You must not fear torture nor any inhuman treatment from us.”

“We are civilians,” Gemil finally said, “we just want to leave, we will not bother you.”

Enasir sighed.

“You are all rebels, but we will deal with that later. For now, Father Jacob, would you please come with me?.” She pointed at the door, but I did not move. “I promise we will not hurt you. I just wish to speak with you, in private.”

“Go,” Jun told me, “and come back.”

I stood up in front of the metal frame shaped like a door. I expected it to open but instead metal walls arose behind me form the floor, creating a new smaller cell formed only of the door and these new metal walls. I completely isolated. Only then the door opened, letting me through. Then the soldiers took of the cuffs from my hands and feet.

“This way,” Enasir told me and I followed her, looking back at the cell and the people I was leaving behind.

The corridor was all metal walls. I couldn’t see any other cells. Then I noticed… How can I explain it?. Basically every cell had this wall made of transparent polymer, but there was also a metal wall that could slide and cover that wall. This is what was happening in all the cells, only ours had been left uncovered for some reason. It also meant there was no way for me to know how many other prisoners were in this ship, and there was no way for prisoners in nearby cells to communicate.

We reached an elevator and we got in.

“You are wearing very different clothes from the last time I saw you,” Enasir pointed out.

In that moment I noticed that indeed I was still wearing the hawaiian shirt and shorts from my tourist costume. Had I really been wearing this in front of the Citizen Council while pretending to be a soldier?. Had I wore this to Mr. Acharya’s house?. Was I really so close to dying wearing these clothes?.

“I had no time to change… it was my costume… I…”

“No worries man. I had people look for your clothes inside your ship, soon you will be able to change… and take a shower. What happened in that ship by the way?, is that how you live?.”

“No we just… we needed to unbalance the ship and make it spin in order to trigger the Dzhanibekov effect.”

“Oh, I see. That way you could turn around in an instant to escape the nets. It was a good plan.”

“But why capture us in the first place?. I don’t know what’s your problem with Jabru, but we are just civilians.”

“You are all rebels Father Jacob and I’m just trying to bring order to humanity, just like you, remember?.”

The elevator stopped, we walked through hallways that looked a lot more welcoming. They had lights, paintings in the walls, even plants. Eventually we reached a door and the soldiers left. We entered.

This was a huge room. Everything was simple, but elegant. There was a desk made of wood. In the desk there was paper and pens. There was a rug in the floor and the rug had many beautiful patterns and colors. The bed was big, bigger than some rooms I’ve had, and the sheets were just grey and beige but they felt expensive when you touched them. There was a bookshelf and the books didn’t look like they came form a 3D printer but rather a printing press… and the bookshelf was made of wood too!.

A pair of my jeans and a shirt were lying on the bed, waiting for me to change.

“These are my quarters,” Enasir explained. “Make yourself at home. There’s a fridge with food over there if you are hungry, and there’s the bathroom, you should really take a shower. We will talk once you’ve changed and you’ve had some time to rest.”

I had a million questions in my mind, but I had to choose one.

“Were are we?, in a ship?.”

“Yes, we are in my flagship, Shamash.”

“And were is this ship?, I mean, what happened with the battle?.”

“Oh, that. We are still retreating to out base. Some of the rebel forces are pursuing us, they may even destroy a few more of our ships, but in this ship you have nothing to worry about. This is a fortress as impregnable as Jabru itself, even if it is much smaller”.

Enasir’s shower was amazing. The water felt heavy and strong falling on me, and it was very hot. Much better than the hotel at Jabru City. She also had fancy soaps and a million bottles. I didn’t know what most of those things were for, but I just know I came out of that shower completely rested.

Then I changed into my regular clothes and sat on the bed to think.

My goal at that moment was to convince her to let us go… no. I had to convince her to let everyone go. Only then we could continue with our mission of going to Earth and finding Linus the Second.

But of course, she had her own reasons to capture the civilians. Maybe she was just looking to add more citizens to her new nation, like Romulus and Remus when the founded Rome and they kidnaped all those women… but no. She had soldiers and they had husbands, wives, children… So then why?. Nothing made sense.

The door opened and Enasir came inside.

“You look so much better now,” was her compliment.

“Thanks, I had a long day yesterday.”

“I can imagine, being in a besieged city must be stressful.”

“But why did you do it?.”

Enasir remained silent for a moment, thinking. Then she took off her cape and threw it over her desk. She took off her heavy military boots and she looked very relived. Then she took her desk chair and dragged next to the bed to sit in front of me.

“When we were in Astoreth you asked me about my mission, and I deflected by making a joke about God turning Astoreth into salt, remember?.”

“I do, it feels like a long time ago but it was earlier this week.”

“I think now I can tell you what my mission is, but for you to understand me you will need some context.

I was born on Earth seventy three years ago. The world was so different then, I don’t know if you will even understand it. Looking back, I think those years were the golden age of humanity, but they didn’t feel special to me, it just felt normal, bad even.

I was born in a country named Senegal. My mother had moved there when she met my father.

Growing up I didn’t feel different from any other child or teenager growing up anywhere else in the world, and I was right. I could go to school, play videogames, go to concerts, do sports or anything I wanted. I had my friends, my social groups, our inside jokes, our insignificant dramas that meant everything… But my great grandfather used to tell me stories of when he was little, he told me this wasn’t always the case.

He told me there was a time when children would not have the option to get an education based on where they were born. Even if you could get an education the quality of it varied wildly depending on the country to the point of being basically worthless in some places. He told me there was a time people died simply because they couldn’t pay for doctors, or because there weren’t doctors. He told me there was a time when armed insurrections would try to stop women from going to school. He told me there was a time when people would starve to death. He told me there was a time when the place you were born determined the opportunities you would have in your future. He told me… so many things.

Listening to him was weird because I was used to grown-ups always saying how things were worse in the present and the past had been better, but not he. He was the only grown-up I knew who accepted that the present was much better than the past, and he had only hope the future would be even better.

I think he convinced me. He convinced me we had accomplished good things as a species, and I guess I wanted to be part of that effort. That’s why I decided to join the Blue Helmets, that was the army of the United Nations back then. Up to that point this army had been made from troops recruited from armies around the world, every country had to contribute, but recently they had started recruiting directly.

I knew about space, of course, I was just not interested on it. The whole point of the space colonies was to get raw materials to fuel our post-scarcity economy. Taking that amount of resources we needed from the planet itself would have been catastrophic, we knew that too well. But in space there were rocks with more platinum or gold or iron than humanity had ever mined in history. If just one of the Jupiter matter extractors worked humanity would have enough resources for the rest of eternity.

The fact there were people in space was just a side effect. Artificial Intelligences needed to be monitored, they needed humans to approve and oversee their choices. Those humans would get lonely and brings their families, they would have children, which would require schools and hospitals… soon you had entire cities in space, but that was never the plan. It was just a side effect.

I and many others thought one day we would develop supervision-less A.I. and when we did all those humans would be able to come back and enjoy Earth with the rest of us, it was just a matter of time.

But space is large and spaceships are self-sustainable. They filter their own air, they clean their own water, they make their own food and they get energy form the sun. Soon people discovered you could just live in your spaceship isolated from the rest of the world.

Many groups of people started to drift together into the void, creating swarms or clans or tribes or however you wanna call them. I guess it would have been fine if those were just hippie communes or monasteries, but soon many of them realized they were far from any authority who could bring them consequences for their actions.

First they attacked each other. Even as a child I heard stories of monasteries raided, the monks and nuns raped, killed or enslaved. Mothers and Father in hippie communes begging for the life of their children to ruthless pirates who didn’t care.

Then they got confident and started attacking proper settlements. Mining stations, shipyards, greenhouses… all raided, the people killed and the bandits stronger.

Up to that point the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate had ruled by sheer authority, without the need of force, but those days were over.

The construction of the fleet started when I was probably ten years old, and it continued when I was well into my twenties.

I was the best soldier in my class and I was offered the chance to join the new UNUM navy. They didn’t say it but they wanted to reserve all the positions of authority for people from Earth, they were terrified of any independence movements.

That’s how I came to space. It was difficult because my abilities and experience on Earth did not translate to space.

For example I always imagined spaceships as lying down, like water ships, cars or airplanes. The vehicle is long and lies horizontal to the floor, then it moves forward to where you are going. All vehicles on Earth are like that, but not in space. You stand in the cabin and the place you are going to is up, it’s on the ceiling, and the place you came form is bellow… until you start decelerating because then it inverts…

To you it sounds normal, obvious even, but it wasn’t to me. That was just one of many obstacles I had to overcome. I had to study like crazy, I lived in the simulations, I did all the exercises to teach my brain to think in three dimensions. My hard work paid off, I came to earn the leadership position they had given me for convenience.

I spent the next twenty years hunting pirates, catching smugglers, bringing stragglers and nomads closer to the Sun. Ensuring humanity would stay together and not break into many different populations floating through interstellar void.

But then the Silence happened, and before you ask, no, I’m as confused as everyone else. One day there was radio silence from Earth with no apparent reason. Then survivors started coming up to orbit and a few people managed to send transmissions from the surface, but their accounts left us just as confused and a lot more scared.

They talked about robot armies fighting against each other. They talked about groups of fanatics destroying communication towers and electric plants. They talked about humans and A.I. making desperate last stands together… but against whom?.

You are probably too young to imagine, but to me the idea that our nations, our institutions, our civilization… the idea it had all been already destroyed, before we noticed, before we could do anything about it… it just didn’t feel like something that could happen.

I was convinced there had been some kind of large scale rebellion. Sure, many millions were dead, a lot of infrastructure had been damaged, it would be a challenge to rebuild from all this… but I was sure soon I would see the heads of state making statements. Messages about unity in the time of disaster. Videos of soldiers bringing food to refugees… there was none of that.

I directed my ship towards Earth and I found the Moon turned into a battlefield. Whatever had happened on Earth had been stopped here, they prevented it from reaching us… but how?, what was it?. How was it possible such a large battle had taken place and my ship was the first one to find out?.

I tried to send rescue missions to Earth, and I regret it, I lost good friends there. They never came back.

What happened next… you know it better than me. Each station started fighting each other. There was chaos, anarchy. We, the captains and generals of the UNUM fleet… we should have been establishing order, keeping the peace…”

Enasir started crying as she said this.

“… we are literally called Peacekeepers, that’s our official name… but we failed. We too fell to infighting… and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years, nearly half my life. Fighting to bring back order, to bring back peace, to stop the suffering brought about by this sudden lack of leadership and structure.

Only recently have I made progress in this fight, as you have seen. The fleet I command now is nothing compared to what we had before, but it will be enough. This defeat is just one minor setback. My life has been full of setbacks for the last three decades, but I have not given up. Finally I have the strength to live up to my responsibility.

I will take back control of the remaining stations from the rebel factions and the United Nations will rebuild the golden age of humanity. We are still on time.”

Her tears were dripping from her nose and her chin into the floor. Her sight was pointing to the floor but it was lost in her memories, in her wishes. I thought that, when seeing her, I would only be able to see the destruction and death from the battle, the waste of each soldier’s life. But looking at her now, I could see so much more.

“But why… are you telling me this?,” I finally asked. “It can’t be just because we played a game and shared a meal.”

“Right,” she said clearing her tears. “For one, I saw you had a similar goal in mind. Granted yours is a lot more spiritual, you hope to gain control and authority through faith while I seek to take it by force… but there’s a very concrete way in which you can help me. Have you succeeded in finding the Pope?.”

“Not yet… in a way it feels like I haven't even started. As you said, there have been a lot of obstacles in the way.”

“But you are still confident you can find the Pope?, or at least become the Pope yourself?.”

“I'm confident in the sense that I will do everything in my power to achieve it or die trying. But honestly I know I probably won’t be good enough. I will probably fail.”

“But there is a chance you could succeed, right?.”

“Yes… but how would that help you?.”

“You see, the United Nations is supposed to be made, well, of nations. But now all those nations have been destroyed. 

Of course some survivors back on Earth have created new city states (which are basically just towns really) and they claim to be the true or legitimate remnants or successors from some other states. I have even talked with a few of their leaders, but their legal claims are shaky at best. They just hope I will give them weapons to fight their rivals… it’s always the same. 

The point is that I can’t recognize them as any previous nation, and I can’t welcome them as new members because they have to be voted in by previous members. That’s were you come in. The reason you can help me is because the Vatican, the city of the Catholic Church, was an Observer State in the United Nations”

“I don’t quite…”

“I am now the Acting Secretary General. As such my authority is very limited. In fact I have more practical authority as admiral of the UNUM fleet. However in extraordinary situations (and these situations are certainly extraordinary) I have the legal authority to welcome Observer States as full members.”

“I…”

“Then the Vatican would be the only member. You would have complete authority over the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the Economy and Social Council and of course the Mandates and their armies.”

“But… the Security Council, the International Court… all these institutions you mention… they don’t exist anymore.”

“Of course they exist, I can show you their founding documents.”

“But those are just words. Theres no people working in them, they have no resources.”

“Because the UN cannot enter in session to allocate them resources.”

“No!, Enasir… what you are saying makes no sense. It’s like, it’s like… a game… yes, a game. You want to get all the points and collect all the pieces, but no one else is playing that game anymore.”

“This is not a game, this is Law.”

“No but… no one cares about the United Nations, no one will obey you…”

“Hmmm, I think I see what you mean, and you do have a point. The rebells may be able to ignore all the laws, all the institutions, and all their rules, but rest assured they can’t ignore my fleet. They must agree that is real, isn’t it?”

“Well… yes but…”

"It's fine. I don’t expect you to be on board right away. At any rate we need to get away from the rebel fleets before anything can be done one way or another. In the meantime… you promised your friends you would be back, didn’t you?.”

Chapter 9

Enasir gave me time to eat first. She actually took me to the ship’s dinner. There I saw many soldiers eating calmly as they watched news in the screens scattered around the hall, news about the retreat and how it was going.

Two things surprised me. The first one was how young most of the soldiers were. I expected them to be as old as Enasir, or older, and a few certainly were. But most of them were young, even younger than me. I guess that was how the military bases had kept existing all this time. They always welcomed young people with no options but to join them.

Come to think of it, many of them probably were the sons, daughters or grandchildren of soldiers just as loyal as Enasir.

The second thing that surprised me was that no one cared about Enasir being in the dinner.

“Aren’t you the captain of this ship?,” I asked.

“I'm the admiral of the whole fleet.”

“Then how come no one cares about you?.”

“You expect me to be like a celebrity or something?.”

"You are basically like the president of this nation, aren’t you?.”

“I'm just a normal soldier. I just happen to be in charge of the fleet at this time. Why would anyone treat me like anything special?.”

The food was descent but I noticed that the whole time I was eating two soldiers, one to either side, were pretending not to watching me. The very instant I was done eating they silently stood up and placed themselves right behind me. If I had been more distracted it would have seemed like they appeared there out of nowhere.

“They will escort you back to your friends,” Enasir explained.

When I came back to the cell with everyone else I was relieved to see all of them had trays of food, much like ones in the dinner, and they were in the middle of eating.

The soldiers put the cuffs in my hands and feet again and I entered the cell the same way I had come in.

Gemil and Sarrat looked at me, but I ignored them for the time being. I had to talk with the mercenaries.

“What did she want?,” Jun asked me.

“She is obsessed about bringing back the United Nations, and apparently the Catholic Church used to be part of it so she wants me to find the Pope. She thinks I will help her have control over an institution with no members and who no one respects… when she explains it it almost makes sense.”

“But did you talk?,” Oakley asked me.

“She did most of the talking, actually… In fact she didn’t ask me a single question.”

“So you didn’t talk?,” Oakley insisted.

“Well, no I didn’t confess to anything.”

“Good boy.”

“What about my ship?,” Sagira asked me, quietly. Her eyes were red.

“Oh… well, it didn’t come up…”

“Fuck…” she replied and resumed her quiet crying.

“Thanks to Jacob we have leverage over her Sagira,” Oakley reminded her in a caring tone of voice.

“And remember that getting your ship back is also our main priority at the moment,” Jun continued.

“Thanks,” she muttered very quietly.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“Did you ask her why she captured us?,” a shy voice asked form the other side of the room. It was Gemil.

I felt so stupid for not insisting on that. There had been so much in my mind, and Enasir had directed the conversation exactly where she wanted. I couldn’t let them know I had been so stupid.

“She ignored my question. She only wanted to talk about the United Nations.”

“She will only tell us what she wants us to know,” Jun said, thinking out loud.

I didn’t sleep very well that night. I think no one did. Also, there was only one toilet. We tried to use the foam to make a wall and have a little privacy, but… I mean… it didn’t really work.

Next morning I woke up to Oakley doing a workout session. Sagira was just lying on the floor looking up, and Jun was lost in thought.

When he saw I was awake he came to me and took me to one corner.

“Listen Father Jacob, she’s gonna come for you again, she wants to win you for her side. Now, I know you're smart, but she’s smarter. She made you forget about the ship or why she captured us. She played the music and you danced.”

“I'm sorry…”

“It's fine, because now that we know we can be prepared. When she gets you out again ignore her, no matter if she says something very important. Tell her you want answers first.”

“Okay, and then what?.”

“Well, remember our priority is to go away. Offer her something. Find a way to convince her to release us. She wants you to find the Pope, right?, use that. Just don’t loose focus, okay?. This is your mission and you will succeed.”

“I will Jun.”

We waited for a couple of hours. In the mean time Sagira was finally done crying and she had joined Oakley in her workout routine, so I decided to join them too. Jun however was happy to keep meditating, completely immobile and indifferent to anything around him.

It was hard to workout without being able to separate our feet and hands, but Oakley and Sagira had it figured out. We did crunches, leg lifts, touching out toes, things like that.

It’s a good thing I had taken off my shirt to not stain it with sweat because when we were resting Nansir approached us.

“Hi,” Oakley said, “do you wanna join?, I’m a very good trainer.”

“No, thanks, I’m not the workout type,” Nansir replied, she was nervous, but she finally turned to me and said, “would you please marry me and Dasis?.”

“I would it’s just…”

“Here, now,” she finally said, she was fidgeting with her hands, “I know this is not how we imagined it… but we don’t know what will happen later, but today, right now, we are together, and we can do this.”

Dasis was also looking at me, ready to drag himself to argue with me if Nansir didn’t convince me.

I could feel the fear in my guts, but I knew what I had to do.

“Okay, I will.”

Jun opened his eyes, Oakley and Sagira looked at each other and stood up.

“Okay let’s see what we can do,” Oakley said grabbing Nansir by her shoulders.

“We need all the boys to turn to their other side,” Sagira ordered everyone in the cell.

“You were right!,” Nansir told me while she was carried to the other side of the cell, “they were ready!.”

I looked around for Jun but he had already gone to Dasis and was helping him stand up to go to other side of the cell.

“Your lady has Oakley and Sagira, but you have me,” Jun assured him, “I too can make you look beautiful.”

Dasis was blushing. Gemil also stood up to help Jun carry him.

“Thank you guys,” Dasis said, “I don’t like to need this, but the implant…”

“Jun will tell Enasir a thing or two about that,” Jun assured Dasis, but he looked at me, his eyes were piercing my soul.

“I will, it’s not right they do this.”

I could not see what the girls were doing, but we in the boys side did a pretty good job if I must say so. We looked at all the clothes we had available and we made Dasis look quite dashing. Gemil had black pants that could pass for something formal if you didn’t pay too much attention.

One of the men had black shoes which Jun was able to make shine using only his socks (and a bit of spit but he was discrete about it), and the piece bringing it all together was my white shirt. By just not buttoning it all the way up and ditching the clerical collar he looked quite elegant. Obviously it also helped that he was quite handsome already and the fact none of us had shaved in a few days actually was working for him. In another life I would have married him.

If you are wondering I put on a dark blue shirt someone else had. It would have been too distracting otherwise.

“Okay, you can turn around now,” Sagira informed us.

The pink foam had been evaporating, but they had taken what remained and made it into an aisle, adorning it with nice geometrical patterns. They had even marked my place and they had also used the foam to make symmetrical patterns in the back wall. Patterns with hearts, starts and lots of spirals.

Ninsar of course looked beautiful. They couldn’t improvise a dress, and Ninsar was quite tall so she was wearing mostly the same clothes as before, so they had focused on her hair. It looked like a fractal. They had made arcs of hair framing her face and the arcs seemed to me made of tiny braids. How did they do that so quickly?. The rest of her hair seemed to have turned into a complex network of Irish knots made of braids. It looked hypnotic, enough to make you focus only on her face and ignore that she was wearing very normal clothes.

I took my place and the people in the cell took their place as the congregation. Then Jun placed Dasis close to me. It was a great effort for him to remain standing and not loose his balance, but he placed a hand on my shoulder for support while Gemil and Jun stayed close to him as his best men, ready to catch him if he lost balance.

Then all the people started signing the nuptial march, and they did it quite well.

“Tatatataaan, tatatataaan, tatatataaan!, tatatataaan!… Tatataaa Tan tatatatan tan taaan tararan taran!…”

Ninsar walked to Dasis and they both looked ecstatic. I was afraid I would attract too much attention if I suddenly started crying of happiness, that was for them. I had a knot in my throat made of guilt, but I pushed though.

“My dear siblings, we are all reunited today, and like most things in life it happened for reasons beyond our control, but then Ninsar and Dasis made something beautiful, they took fate and turned it into the happiest moment of their lives… This is no doubt a great example of how to make God proud of the freedom he grants us…”

The wedding went on. I don’t remember very well what I said or what we did or in what order. I tried to mostly follow the structure of a mass but I’m pretty sure there were things I forgot. Instead of the lectures of that day I had to use a few passages I had memorized and which served the occasion somehow, like the passage of “What you did to them you did with me.” It has one mention of people being in jail and it’s all about having compassion for everyone.

Anyway, no one remembers the middle parts o weddings, we all just want to get to the end.

“You may kiss the bride…”

Before I had even finished the phrase they both were kissing with a passion and joy I had never seen. We got scared this would make Dasis loose balance, but Ninsar grabbed him from the shirt with enough strength to keep him stable for a while. It also helped that soon they were both hugging each other, but eventually Dasis did end up loosing balance. He fell and he hit his head very hard on the floor. There was silence.

“You knocked me off my feet babe!,” Dasis said. We all laughed and it was the best thing I’ve ever seen.

After that we started singing songs, some people tried to dance but it was hard with our feet and hands cuffed. Sarrat told a funny story of how Nansir and Dasis met… somehow we were having a good time. The future was terrifying and the present was painful, and yet we were all genuinely happy for Nansir and Dasis.

Then Enasir arrived.

We didn’t hear the boots in the hall like before, we were probably too distracted. Now that I think of it, I don’t know how long was she standing there, watching us. The point is that we finally noticed her and all the emotions we had successfully silenced for a moment were again deafening in our hearts.

“Good morning,” she said, “what happened here?.”

“A wedding,” I replied.

Enasir looked at Dasis and Nansir who were seating together, frozen by fear in an otherwise tender pose.

“You two?,” she asked and they nodded. “Congratulations, had you told me yesterday I'd had a wedding present ready, but I’ll see what I can do in short notice. Anyway, Father Jacob if you would,” she pointed at the door.

Dasis then tried to take off my shirt to give it back, but I made a sign that he shouldn’t and I went out.

This time Enasir had come alone. We were alone as we walked through that long hall to the elevator.

“Are all of these cells?,” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“With the innocent civilians you captured after the battle?.”

“Some of them, yes.”

“Why?, they just wanted to run away form the battle.”

“So did we. You saw the weapon that station had, I couldn’t risk they firing again.”

She didn’t explain more, but then I understood what she was trying to imply.

“You knew they wouldn’t fire if you had civilians on board…”

“Their civilians specifically. Many years ago people developed the tactic of always having children on board, but it rarely works. They just feel bad for the children but they fire anyway. If you have prisoners however, if you have people that belong to their side, even if they were running away, suddenly that works. Suddenly they are much less likely to shoot.”

I stayed silent for a while. She was right. We got to the elevator.

“You could at least treat them better. We have one toilet for like 20 people there, and why are we still cuffed?. I’ve been in jail many times, they let your hands and feet free while you are in a cell…” the elevator door opened. Enasir entered but I stood there. “Well?.”

“No. Prisoners being uncomfortable is the least of my concerns. In fact I don’t believe it can concern me.”

“It should. At least let people with medical mods use them. The groom at my cell can’t walk because you deactivated the mod in his spine.”

“Maybe that could be the wedding gift…”

“And what about the ships?.”

“We have them, of course.”

“We want them back, with everything they had inside, and in working condition.”

The elevator doors were closing, but Enasir stopped them with her hand.

“And when you have your ship back, how will you know where to look for the Pope?.”

“You are very good at changing the subject Enasir, but I won’t let you. I only care about getting you to release us and give us back our ships.”

“Sure, but thing is, in order for us to negotiate I have to know you really can give me what I want.”

“I will only talk about the ships.”

“Other catholics tried to find their leader before you. The Cardinal of Mars sent a rescue mission, they never found anything. Then he declared himself the Pope and then he was assassinated… you must know that.”

“The ships, we only care about our ship.”

“Father Jacob, I want you to go find the Pope. I need the Vatican to reestablish the UN. Of course I will give you your ship back, okay?. I just need to know if there is actually a chance you will succeed. There, convince me and that’ll help you get your ship back.”

I had to be careful, but this looked promising.

“The martian didn’t know were too look for him. They went to the Pacific because the last place Linus the Second transmitted from was Hawaii, but I know where he was really headed, and if he survived, I know where he is.”

“And how do you know that?.”

There it was, that was the trap. I could almost feel Jun smiling as I caught it like an arrow in the air.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t need me anymore.”

Enasir smiled.

“So close… I could still get that information out of you, you know?.”

“It's better to have me as an ally.”

“True. The most important part in the Art of War is to know how to prevent the fight in the first place… come. We can keep trying to convince each other somewhere else.”

She took me to a different floor than the previous time. The other floor I had seen was clearly some kind of residential area but as soon as the elevator doors opened I could see the walls here were reinforced, I could see automatic weapons ready to fire, I could see hatches ready to deploy combat robots.

“Here's the thing Father Jacob,” Enasir told me, “you know I want you and your team to succeed, but first I need to earn your loyalty, so that you will be on my side if you do find the head of state of the Vatican.”

“You have made a terrible job so far on that.”

“I didn’t know you had been captured. They just captured all civilians they could and you happened to be there. I only found out we had you because I ordered a report about our hostages. You can imagine my surprise when I saw your face and name in the report."

“And yet you kept us in prison.”

“Well you are traveling with one very interesting person, that man named Jun. His father was actually a General in charge of a military base, but he turned into a rebel during the Silence. Then we decided to do a background check on the women and they came out completely normal. Born a few years before the Silence, just like you, suffered a lot during the silence, but who hasn’t?, and then at one point… nothing. Completely unremarkable lives. Why would the son of a powerful rebel leader be with such unremarkable people?, and why would you be with them?. I could not let such interesting people just wandering around my ship… before earning their loyalty that is.”

“Well, Enasir… I can promise you that if I find the Pope I will ask him to consider your plan about rebuilding the United Nations, you can have my word on that. Is that a deal?.”

“Sadly it is not, and that’s why we are here.”

She pointed to a door at the end of the hallway. We walked there and the door opened, revealing… something I had never seen before. It was clearly a piece of technology, but I had no idea what it was or what it did. It was some kind of central spire made of blue and black metals, about the size of a person, hanging from the ceiling and surrounded by thin filaments of the same material forming complex structures. All of it was encased in a cylinder made of some transparent polymer, but from the way light was diffracted through it I could tell it was much thicker than the polymer used in the windows of spaceships.

“What is this thing?,” I asked.

“I am Enlil,” a voice said and I became paralized with fear.

“An A.I…” I whispered.

“Yes,” Enlil replied.

I was shaking, I was frozen in place. I was prepared for a lot, but not for this.

My mind was hijacked by visions of people in Ceres eating each other, ships being destroyed by abandoned defense systems, automated greenhouses refusing to send food to refugee camps, automated mining stations destroying inhabited asteroids, automated medical stations refusing to take in patients without insurance…

“I understand how you feel Jacob, but you have to understand that all the harm caused by Artificial Intelligences was our fault. These creatures were made to be loyal above anything else, to obey. When our nations and institutions collapsed we left them without leadership, they had no option but to keep obeying the last orders they got, regardless of what those orders were.”

“But then… how…?”

“Once I convinced Enlil I was the legitimate Acting Secretary General of the United Nations he was able to take orders from me. Even more, since the A.I.s of most other military ships and stations were destroyed or disabled this triggers an emergency protocol allowing Enlil to take control over those ships and stations. This is how I unified all of the UNUM forces. I took control of their technology and they had no options but to agree with Enlil that I am indeed the Acting Secretary General.”

Maybe in the future when the days of the Silence are just an old story and everyone who lived through it is dead… maybe then it will be very hard for people to understand how I felt in that moment. To the people of the future let me explain: I felt that Enasir had a gun to my head and to the head of everyone else in her fleet. A defective gun whose trigger was impossible to control.

“Is this how you want to earn my loyalty?, showing me you control an A.I.?.”

“Yes. Enlil gives me control of all UNUM technology in the Solar System, hundreds of ships and dozens of bases, enough to defeat all the rebel factions.”

“I should also add that no human has the cognitive capacity to defeat my strategies in battle,” Enlil calmly boasted.

I looked at the spire and the complex web of metal around it. I knew that machine was the source of the voice, but it still felt weird talking to a machine as if it was a person.

“And yet you still lost the battle,” I reminded him.

“My strategy failed because I did not know Jasso Station could move, no one knew,” Enlil explained. "Another artificial mind, one of my siblings, must have been working on that technology when human civilization collapsed. I assume a group of humans found his or her work and applied it to Jasso Station. No matter. Now that I have accounted for this new fact I have developed new strategies. No human can defeat us now.”

“We will win the next battle,” Enasir promised me, "we will win every battle, and then we will win this war, Enlil and me. There’s no other possibility. That’s how I will earn your loyalty, because I have the power to actually change the world. Tell me father, how did you plan to go to Earth?.”

“We stole a return pod from the army of Jabru City.”

“You stole it?, how?.”

“With the crew that I hired.”

“Ooooh, it starts to make sense now. The son of a rebel leader turned mercenary recruited a couple of talented girls before they got involved in anything else, taught’em how to do things right. Then you come and hire them. They must be good… but I am better. I will give you a return pod. I will give you a new crew. I can give you a whole battalion. All for free, no need to waste your money.”

“Oh yeah, surround me with your soldiers, ready to kill me if I disobey. I might as well be a prisoner.”

“Why would you want to disobey?, our goals are aligned. If you had met me first you would have no issue about working with me.”

Was she right?… why was I following Jun’s orders?. She had all the resources I could possibly need and so much more. It would be so easy working with her… and see her conquer Jabru Station, Europa Station, the Elbereth Swarm, all the nomadic tribes… She and her A.I. would sweep through the solar system crushing into submission all the communities that had emerged from the chaos of the Silence… and that included groups like the violent people who had hurt me… Even if I didn’t help her, could I stop her?. She had a military A.I., she would win eventually.

Then I laughed. My own mind was making her arguments for her, like if she had infected me with some kind of mind virus, but after what I have been through in my life, I was prepared. After all, I had escaped Douglas in the real world as well as in my soul. I took a moment to imagine myself working with her new United Nations, and I could tell I was miserable.

I agreed with her that the chaos of the Silence had created unfathomable amounts of suffering, like a forest being destroyed by a fire. But now she would destroy all the new plants growing form the ashes, all in the hopes of resurrecting the old burnt out trees. I could not accept that. Even if she could succeed I could not accept the violence it would require.

“I'm sorry Enasir, but if I had met you before, I would have never chosen to work with you.”

“Fascinating,” she replied, “you could have tried to lie to me, trick me into releasing you and your crew, but you just can’t do that, can you?.”

My heart sunk to my stomach, what had I done?.

“That's something I respect about you,” she continued. “Once it comes to defending your ideology you forget about everything else. You are a man of principles. I could have never earned your loyalty, so I will make that your only choice.”

Chapter 10

Enasir called two of her soldiers and they took me away. I didn’t even knew where we were going, just that I was being moved around the ship but my focus was on my shame and my guilt about failing my mission.

And yet I could not escape the thought that I could have never succeeded. Enasir had made up her mind about me the instant she met me, the fact she found me again so soon was just a lucky coincidence for her.

Perhaps it was better this way. Perhaps I had to fail on my mission so that Enasir would not take control of the Church and the United Nations, after all: “God works in mysterious ways”, or so I thought back then.

They took me to a weird room with no forniture, it almost seemed like another cell, except it felt welcoming somehow.

Then we just waited there. The soldiers didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask any questions. After a while the door opened again and many of my cellmates came into the room. There was Jun, Sagira and Oakley, of course, but also Gemil, Sarrat, Masdra, Nansir, Dasis and a few other adults form Gemil’s group whose names I don’t remember.

“I failed,” I told them. It felt wrong to talk in front of the soldiers, but I had to. “I don’t know what she’s gonna do now, I’m sorry.”

“We will come out of this one,” Jun said, irradiating confidence. “Won't we?,” he asked one of the soldiers, who ignored him.

Then I saw Gemil, Sarrat and the others looking very worried.

“And the children?,” I asked.

“They left them in the cell,” Gemil explained, “she wouldn’t do anything to them, would she?.”

“No, I don’t think she’s the kind of person to hurt children,” I replied, but by that was exactly why the children were left behind, because she wanted to hurt us, and we all knew it.

Then the doors closed and we felt the room moving, going down. Apparently it had been an elevator all along.

We went down and down for a while, going down hundreds of floors, until the doors finally opened on a room full with hundreds of people.

The sudden abundance of light hurt my eyes for a second, but I could see the elevator had opened on some kind of stage, and yet the people were not looking at us, at the stage, they had their backs turned to us. They were sitting on rows upon rows of metal desks with all kinds of screens and instruments. They were sending and receiving messages all the time, they were working analyzing many streams of data.

On the stage itself, in front of us, there was a chair for the admiral and a few other lower chairs for the other military leaders of lower rank, however they were all empty.

We were in the control center not only of this ship but the entire fleet.

At the front of the room there were tons of screens showing data about the fleet, their base, casualties, energy usage, repairs needed across the fleet… but what caught my attention was the roof, because it was actually a transparent dome, betraying the age of this ship. Through that dome I could actually see the rest of the ship, an impossibly tall tower going up into the sky, higher than the eye could see. The guassian guns surrounding the tower still shined bright red from the heat and they looked like a cohort of angels.

Then a door opened to our right and Enasir entered the room. The soldiers did not stop working to salute her or acknowledge her, but they didn’t have to, the room somehow felt different with her presence there.

She walked to her admiral chair and loudly announced.

“The Shamash Military Court is now in session!”

When you think about it, trails are a very unusual concept. If one person kills another for revenge it is murder but then if that same person is sentenced to death for their crime it is not considered another murder or revenge but rather justice. All because their death was decided by a judge during a trail.

I can imagine early humans, living in their small nomadic communities in peace, until one day they had some sort of conflict they couldn’t resolve. They argued, they screamed, they said hurtful things but the conflict couldn’t be resolved until their leader came. The leader heard both sides of the argument and took a decision. Then those two people accepted that decision and stopped fighting, even if they didn’t agree with that decision. Those people didn’t know it, but that was the first trail in history.

But why did they stop fighting?, why did they accept a decision they didn’t agree with?. It could be just a matter of authority, they were just obeying the authority of their leader, but I’m not convinced by this explanation. We don’t perceive trails as matters of authority, the judge is not giving an order, they are giving a sentence. Instead trails are supposed to be matters of truth and justice. The goal of a trail is to resolve a conflict in a manner which is best for the community.

Maybe the community is the key. Maybe the essence of a trail is that we as a community realize that it would be impossible for all of us to come to an agreement in certain conflicts, so we create a decision making system, and we agree to abide by the results of that system… or at least, enough people agree that they overcome those who don’t. 

Of course at the core of that system is usually a single person, the judge, but we don’t see their sentences as the decisions of a single person, but rather as the product of a process which involves the whole community.

For that reason no one calls the judge nor the hangman murderers, because they are acting as instruments for their communities rather than as individuals.

That’s how we perceive things, but I’m not sure that’s how they really are. Maybe the judge and the hangman really are murderers, maybe every person in the community is a murderer for agreeing to that system. Maybe seeing things in a certain way doesn’t make them so.

Those were the thoughts running through my mind while Enasir gave a litany of formalities.

“Me, Enasir of the Fayeen Clan, Grand Admiral of the UNUM peacekeeper’s fleet and Acting Secretary General of the United Nations by provisions of the Establishment of the Chain of Command, section 3, paragraph 4…”

It was almost like if she was reciting a magic spell, like if saying those words gave her real power to decide over life and death. Or maybe it was like a game, like how when playing hide and seek you have to run back to the place where you counted and announce where the hidden person was before they do, or at least that’s how I played it.

“…in view of this unprecedented rebellion…”

She just kept going, did she do this every time?, and the soldiers at their desks just kept working, ignoring everything she said.

“…the establishment of this Military Court of Justice, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all relevant treaties.”

At least she didn’t list the relevant treaties.

Then she finally sat down in her chair and two soldiers came to stand to her sides, a young man and a young woman.

“First Lieutenant Izumi,” Enasir said to the woman, “which is the first case of today?.”

“Going by alphabetical order that would be…”

“Let's do that one next, which one is second?”

“Uhmmm, it is Gemil Tynyshbaev,” she replied.

“The court calls on Gemil Tynyshbaev!,” she shouted.

We had been made to line up against the wall behind the chairs for the commanders. As soon as we heard Gemil’s name we all looked at him, he was scared, my heart was pounding on my ears. I could feel in my arms and legs the energy to either fight or run away, but I could do neither of them.

Two soldiers came and grabbed Gemil by his arms so that his feet didn’t even tough the floor, and they placed him bellow the stage in front of Enasir.

“State your name for the record,” Enasir ordered him.

“No,” Gemil replied. He was so brave in that moment, but I had put him in that situation, my failure caused it.

Enasir found his reply amusing. 

“I inform you that if I find you in contempt of court this trail will proceed without you, and you will have no say in it.”

“My name if Gemil Tynyshbaev, and I have committed no crime.”

“We shall see about that. Izumi, would you read the accused his charges please?.”

“Mister Gemil Tynyshbaev, you stand accused of rebellion against the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate…”

She had to stop reading because suddenly Sarrat, Dasis, Nansir and all the other adults of his group started screaming with an anger to rival the still shining gausian guns.

They were shouting many things. I couldn’t understand all their voiced mixed together, but one scream towered over the rest. It was Sarrat with sheer rage ready to burst from her eyes.

“It doesn’t exist anymore!,” she was screaming.

“Of course it exist!,” Enasir screamed back, standing from her chair and facing Sarrat, “here we are!.”

“You are just warlords!,” Sarrat replied. “Ruling over your small communities like all the rest!.”

Enasir gave a signal and one of the soldiers slapped Sarrat in the face…

“Nooo!,” Gemil begged.

 …but she continued screaming, then they punched her in the stomach, leaving her unable to scream and with blood dripping from her mouth.

“I will tolerate no chaos in this court,” Enasir proclaimed. “Please Misses Izumi, continue where you were.”

“Gemil Tynyshbaev, you also stand accused of treason against the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate, of doing trade with rebels, of flying in an unregistered spaceship and doing so without a proper license, of entering restricted space, of not responding to UNUM distress beacons. Furthermore you are also accused of taking arms against the Peacekeeping Forces of the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate, of taking orders from rebel leaders and aiding rebels in their goals. Finally it has come to the court's attention that you have never paid taxes, for this reason you are also accused of tax evasion. How do you plea?.”

“Don't answer!,” Jun screamed and promptly one of the soldiers punched him in the stomach too, probably even breaking a rib or two.

“How do you plea Mister Tynyshbaev?,” Enasir insisted.

Gemil was confused, he was looking up, his mouth moved and closed as he doubted about saying something or nothing at all.

“Mister Tynyshbaev,” Enasir continued, “if you refuse to reply you will be found in contempt of court. How do you plea?.”

“Inocent,” he finally said.

“Very well. Then we shall proceed…”

“Lawyer!,” I screamed. One of the soldiers was going to punch me just like Jun and Sarrat but Enasir turned to see me and he doubted. “Lawyer you say?.”

“How can we have a trial when the accused doesn’t even have a lawyer to defend him?.”

“Didn't you hear?, I was very clear. Because of the sui generis situation we find ourselves in the accused have the freedom to represent themselves.”

“Say you refuse!,” Oakley screamed at Gemil, she had the same idea I had, but she was faster.

“I refuse…” he immediately said.

“To what?,” Enasir asked, smiling, planting a trap, “you refuse a lawyer?, is that it?.”

The soldiers seemed to know exactly what she was thinking and were ready to silence any of us if we tried to tell him what to say.

I could see the fear and confusion in his eyes, the kind of fear that doesn’t let you think straight.

“I refuse… to… to represent myself, but I do want a lawyer.”

“Well, I’m sure we can find you one in no time. Father Jacob, do you have any experience with Law?.”

“…Only church law, but if you give me time to prepare…”

“Hmmm, Mister Thandiwe, could you be Mister Gemil’s lawyer today?,” she asked the young soldier on his right.

“Certainly, Admiral.”

Then Thandiwe calmly walked down the stage and stood next to Gemil.

“I want Jacob as my lawyer,” Gemil insisted.

“You have a right to a lawyer,” Enasir explained, “you don’t have a right to any lawyer. Besides, I assure you Mister Thandiwe will do just fine, he studied International Law in our military academy. Also, Izumi, would you please represent the Prosecution?.”

“I will, Admiral,” and she also went down the stage to stand next to Gemil.

“Now, for your opening statements, starting with the Defense.”

“Your Honor, my client has been entirely unaware of the realities of the United Nations for the majority of his life. Ever since the event commonly known as The Silence the colonies have been submerged in a constant state of rebellion, there have even been rebellions against the rebel governments… It is no wonder than that my client was forced to live under rebel occupied areas and was unable to obey the United Nations, even if he had wanted to.”

“Very compelling arguments Thandiwe,” Enasir admitted, “now we’ll hear the prosecution’s argument by Izumi.” 

“I will start by pointing your attention to a phrase my counterpart said just a moment ago: ‘for the majority of his life’. Yes, it is sadly true that millions of people live under rebel governments today and have done so for many years. That could be enough to excuse their actions if, and only if, when seeing the legitimate government of the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate they had chosen to abandon the rebels and rejoin the only legitimate government of humanity outside of Earth.

In other words, the moment they had the choice to join UNUM and renounce the rebels, but didn’t, they became proper rebels, and their past actions can no longer be seen as coercion, but only as endorsement.”

“That’s a very interesting line of reasoning. Any final remarks from the Denfense?.”

“Final?!,” I screamed without thinking. Enasir turned to see me. “What about witnesses?, what about evidence?.”

“Father Jacob, we have like twenty other similar trials to go through, we are technically still on a battlefield, and I’ve seen the evidence because I’m a witness myself. Legally I could just read the accused his charges, hear their reply and give my sentence. The fact I’m bothering to even give them a lawyer in these circumstances is more than enough already,” then she turned to see Gemil again. “Any final remarks?.”

“Misses Enasir… Admiral… Your Honor… I have only tried to live in peace my whole life. Peace, that’s all I want… do you even know why we were in Jabru?, where we were going?.”

“No, I do not, why were you in Jabru?.”

“When the Silence happened my father took me, my sister and my mother to be in orbit around Uranus. His idea was that since the ship was self sufficient we could just wait there as long as necessary, until the chaos ended.”

“A sensible man.”

“Yes, he was, and it turned out many other people had similar ideas. Soon there were a few hundred ships orbiting Uranus with us, and we started to communicate through the radio, we got to know each other, we formed a community. There was this old lady, Misses Wulandari, she escaped with her daughter and her daughter’s husband, but they both died before she arrived in orbit. She didn’t know how to fly her ship but my father guided her step by step through the radio. She was alone, and she used to call us, she would tell us stories, talk with my mom, ask help from my dad… but one day pirates arrived. They saw there were many undefended civilian ships and they attacked. Misses Wulandari called us through the radio to ask for help, but it was too late, they had already boarded her ship. We heard her screaming, we heard what they were doing to her, it was horrible. Eventually the transmission stopped, my dad warned the others and we ran away…”

“How is this related with Jabru?.”

“Well, your honor, after that we went to one place after another, always looking to live in peace. We didn’t care if they were rebels, we just wanted to be safe, you can’t blame us for wanting to be safe. Along the way we met many other people who joined in our quest to find a place to live in peace and I think we’ve found it. There are swarms of ships leaving the Solar System, too far for pirates to attack, too isolated for anyone to have a conflict with them. I don’t know what kind of life they have there, but I’ve heard that children go to school, that sick people are taken care of, that everyone lives in peace. That’s why we were in Jabru, because I wanted all of us to see grass and open spaces one last time.”

“Is that it?.”

“My point is, our only goal is, and has ever been, to live in peace. I’m sorry if we lived with the rebels but at times that was our only choice. We don’t want to attack your government, we never meant to do anything against it, we are sorry, and in the end you will never have to worry about us again, because we will leave, forever.”

“Hmmm… Mister Tynyshbaev, back when I was young we had a term for the kind of swarm you want to join: ‘Straggler Fleets’. These were people who wanted to leave the Solar System to one day reach Proxima Centauri or some other star, a few wanted to live forever in interstellar void. Can you imagine what would have happened if we allowed it?. Humanity would have fractured into a million tiny groups, forever. Each group would develop their own culture, have their own history, their own technology. They wouldn’t even be able to communicate those differences to each other, because the distances are so vast. There wouldn’t be one humanity, but many. So my job was to hunt them, force them back close to the sun, and ensure humanity would remain together, forever.”

Enasir remained in silence for a while after that, looking at Gemil.

“Your dedication to peace is commendable up to the point where it becomes cowardice. Each of us has the obligation to do the right thing, even when it’s dangerous, and that includes fighting for your nation. The fact that you want to run away and take no part in this conflict is just a further betrayal to our cause. The very fact you think the Straggler Fleets are not rebels just proves how little you think of your own nation. For these reasons, by the authority granted upon me by the United Nations of Earth, I Enasir of the Fayeen Clan sentence you to death.”

Then a soldier came behind Gemil, pointed a gun to his head, and fired.

I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. Gemil was death and it couldn’t be undone.

The screams restarted, but this time they weren’t rage, but pain.

Enasir turned towards me and for a moment I could read her mind. She would make trials for everyone leaving me for last. Then during my trail she would inform me I could be pardoned for my crimes by cooperating with her. If my trail was first I would probably choose to die, but after seeing everyone else die, would I feel the same way?. She expected this would break me somehow.

Then, if after all that I still refused to work with her, she would finally resort to torturing me until I told her what she wanted to know.

There was no future in which she didn’t win.

“Clean that mess and then we’ll continue,” she said to one of her soldiers and she left the stage with Thandiwe and Izumi following close by.

Sarrat was a crying, her mouth was open without making sound. She slowly knelt and let out a few screams until finally the pain broke through her and she was finally able to wail. Just a few days ago they had no reason to believe they wouldn’t spend their lives together, and now it was only her life.

I was responsible for this, I didn’t try hard enough because I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t even felt worthy of comforting her, but luckily the rest of her tribe was right with her.

“Jacob, I have to tell you something,” Oakley told me, bringing me back form my thoughts just for a second. “I want you to know my real name is Gabriela, and also, we tricked you back in Astoreth.”

“What?…” I couldn’t even understand why she was telling me something so trivial in that moment.

“When you tried to hire a mercenary company for the first time you offered them way too much money, and they knew Jun needs it, so that’s why they were rejecting you, they wanted you to hire us. When you finally contacted Jun the plan was to see how much money we could get from you. You were not paying us three times our rate, you were paying us like 20 times our rate, or more. Sorry about that, I just thought you should know.”

I couldn’t even reply to her, none of that seemed remotely important at the moment.

“She's gonna kill all of you, and torture me.”

“That's why I had to say it now.”

I was distracted then by the noise of the cleaning robots sucking up Gemil’s blood, and by the sight of the body bag in which they were going to carry his corpse away. I just wanted to tell him I was sorry, I never imagined Enasir would kill him. I still do.

Then I remembered something.

“What about the children?,” I asked, “if you kill them all…”

“If they are all sentences to death,” she corrected me.

“…what will happen with their kids?.”

“They would become wardens of the state and they would be educated in our settlements, like Izumi and Thandiwe.”

She smiled while she said it, she fucking smiled while Izumi and Thandiwe just stood loyally next to her. That was enough for me, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“You said we had nothing to fear from you!,” I accused her, letting my rage take over. “You said you would treat us humanely. You lied you fucking bitch.”

“I am treating you all humanely. Nothing in Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, or any of the Fundamental Documents forbids executions. Now Father take care of your language, you are a priest, you can’t go around calling women ‘bitches.’”

“I'll call you however the fuck I goddam please. You killed an innocent man. God may have mercy on you but I won’t.”

“I feel like you have an anger issue.”

“Only with fucking murderers. I’ll kill you first chance I get.”

“Bold words for someone who is in shackles.”

“Bold confidence for someone making so many enemies.”

Enasir finally laughed out loud.

“I have been making enemies my whole life Father Jacob.”

Finally Enasir got back to her chair, but instead of Izumi calling another one of us to be executed a door opened on the left side of the room.

I could not come up with an explanation of why I was seeing two Jabru soldiers in full tactical gear entering the room. They were such a sharp contrast to Enasir’s soldiers whose uniforms couldn’t have stopped a bullet and which didn’t cover their faces at all.

The Jtwo abru soldiers looked around the room and then a group of diplomats arrived. I could recognize a few members of the Citizen Council we had met a few days ago but I didn’t know the rest of them, presumably because they came from Jasso. However I did notice that one of them was a bishop because of the clothes he was wearing.

Finally a second pair of Jabru soldiers arrived and both groups of soldiers formed a sort of perimeter around the diplomats.

“Wellcome,” said Enasir, “the whole UNUM fleet is honored to receive the rebel diplomatic party.”

The diplomats wanted to reply, but their attention was on the robots cleaning the blood and the corpse still lying in the floor in front of Enasir.

Finally one of them broke the silence, a woman I had not seen before.

“What happened here?.”

“A trial, the accused was found guilty and sentenced to death,” Enasir calmly explained.

“And what about those people behind you?,” asked another member of the diplomatic party, a man this time.

“They are awaiting for their trials, you caught me in a very busy day.”

“Accused of what?,” the bishop asked.

“Rebellion, treason, tax evasion… the usual.”

“Pathetic,” the woman replied, “we defeat your army and this is how you plan to intimidate us?. We’ve seen you run away, we are not afraid.”

“Is that all you came to say?.”

The woman sighed and stepped back, her anger taking the best of her. I could relate.

The fourth and last diplomat, a man from the citizen council, stepped forward and spoke.

“We represent the Free Cities of Jabru and Jasso, and we are interested in peace. Our factions can certainly hurt each other a lot, as you can certify by simply talking with the crew of the Ishushinak, as soon as we release the survivors we captured. That’s why we are willing to let you trade freely and to promise not to take up arms against you, as long as you don’t take up arms agains’t other free cities.”

“I am interested on the part about exchanging prisoners, but other than that I’m gonna pass. The only possible outcome of this war is UNUM taking full control of any and all rebel occupied stations, or if that proves impossible, destroying them.”

“You are literally still retreating from a battle you lost,” the bishop reminded her.

“Am I being too confident?, what do you think, Enlil?.”

“Your confidence is well founded, Grand Admiral,” Enlil replied.

The two men from the Citizen Council froze in fear for a second, realizing the voice they had just heard came form an Artificial Intelligence, but the Bishop and the woman remained as confident as before, which clearly upset Enasir.

“You both are old enough to know no human can hope to defeat a military Artificial Intelligence, not even Napoleon or Alexander the Great could match it.”

“Yes,” the woman replied with a devilish smile, “no human could.”

Then Enasir knew, then we all knew, then a pod crashed on the ceiling and the impact threw us all around.

Chapter 11

Boarding a space ship is difficult, really difficult. I know because I’ve done it, or rather, I was forced to do it.

First off, you have to match momentum, or at least match it enough to make the collision survivable both for you and the ship you want to take over. If you just want to destroy a ship there are a million easier ways.

The problem with matching momentum is that the other ship will of course try to change their momentum as much as possible to make it impossible for you to match them. They will decelerate, they will accelerate, they will spin, they will turn around… you can imagine.

In my case we would use these cold welding ropes that literally fused to the enemy ship, so that any change in momentum they do would be transferred to us, making the process a lot more survivable, at least for us.

Of course this process becomes a billion times simpler if you can just sneak up on your victim.

This, however, was pretty much impossible for a long time. It’s now like you can hide in space. Sure, if you are very far enough people may not see you simply because space is so vast, but once you get close, how could they not see you?, how could their ship not detect your presence with a myriad of different instruments?.

That’s the problem UNUM had to solve when they wanted to crack down on the many pirate factions that had formed, and thanks to human ingenuity they found them.

There are ways to trick every measurement device into not measuring something even if it is there, and if you can apply all those tricks to a single object it will become invisible to all instruments a space ship could have.

The solution is to improve your measuring devices so they can’t be tricked and of course UNUM developed those too. They were on an arms race against themselves, always developing new cloaking technology as well as the ways to make it obsolete.

This arms race had been paused ever since the Silence, but now it had restarted and for once UNUM was loosing the race.

The first pod was just a distraction. While we were busy falling and being confused the Jabru soldiers sprinted to the doors on both sides of the room.

The automated defense system (the ADS) activated and hidden guns came out of the walls to shoot at the soldiers, but their armors could resist for a moment and that's all they needed. They reached the doors and activated a device that looked like a grenade but when it “exploded" it released a substance that expanded and them immediately solidified, blocking the hallways.

Now, obviously I didn’t see all this happening with clarity. The impact threw me around violently and smashed me against the floor. I tried to stand up, trying to get ahead of the confusion and run away, but when I looked at the doors they were already blocked and the Jabru soldiers were death in front of them. I didn’t fully understand what had happened at that moment, but I do now.

Then the second pod finally crashed, but with a lot less speed. At first I did not know where the second pod was, but then I saw a circle of hot red metal beginning to form in the wall with all the screens as the pod started to melt the outer shielding of the Shamash.

“RUN!,” Enasir screamed. She looked at the hallways only to see soldiers trying to remove the material blocking it. They pushed, the scratched, they shot at it, but she quickly understood they would never remove it on time, they would have to fight here. “Enlil!, activate the ADS!,” she screamed.

But nothing happened, only then I noticed the screens were black and all the instruments at the desks were off. Now I know both pods were meant to produce electromagnetic pulses to temporarily deactivate all devices in this sections of the ship, but the mechanism in the first pod had failed and that’s why Enlil managed to react on time to kill the Jabru soldiers before everything in the room being deactivated when the second pod arrived.

And yet Enlil himself was not deactivated, his core was somewhere else in the ship, in the room Enasir had shown me. The pulse had made him blind and deaf in a small section of the ship, but I was sure he was giving orders to come rescue Enasir right now, and it wouldn’t take him too long.

I was very stupidly standing there, looking around, trying to think about what to do when Oakley, Jun and Sagira found me and dragged me to the hallway Enasir had came from. Sure it was blocked and we couldn’t run away, but the blockade had formed a couple of meters inside the hallway giving us a small space were we could hide form all the mess going on in the control room.

Enasir was there standing on the stage, she looked scared and worried for a moment, but then she went to the back of the room, next to the elevator, took out her gun, and started to shoot at the wall. When she had made a hole she reached into it trying to pull something. I was very confused until the wall finally gave up and she pulled a whole rack of assault rifles and gas masks form inside the wall.

“Everyone grab one of each and take defensive positions!,” she screamed.

Suddenly the soldiers who had just been confused and aimless became an organized mechanism. They took the guns and they used them to access other gun racks hidden around the room. They moved desks to form defensive barriers, they formed several lines of defense. They even dragged some of the desks to the stage at the back of the room to form a kind of fortress. All in just a minute or two.

At some point Sarrat and the rest of her tribe came to take cover with us, but looking back I can’t remember if we called them, if they saw us, or maybe they were already there when Jun dragged with him.

In that moment we were all just waiting for the pod to finish melting the wall and for whomever was inside it to come out.

“The goal is to survive,” Jun said to all of us, “remember that, whatever happens, your goal is to survive this.”

I peaked over the corner and I saw how the pod’s laser finished cutting a circle in the wall of the room, but the metal disk didn’t fall, instead a dense white gas began flowing from the gaps the laser had made, filling the whole room in an instant, making it hard to see and to breathe.

Then the metal disk was launched across the room. First I heard a thunder and I felt it resonating in my body. The disk went crashing through all the desks, cutting through the soldiers hidden behind them, leaving pieces of equipment and human bodies scattered around the ponds of blood. Finally the disk slammed against the fortress of desk improvised on top of the stage, but it didn’t destroy it, having been slowed by all the other desks.

Then the screams of horror and pain started as they saw their friends had died. It was deafening, but one person wasn’t screaming.

“No, no, no,” he said, begging to the universe.

Then I heard a heard a BOOMING laughter, there was no more time to mourn, and the shooting started.

The surviving UNUM soldiers were shooting desperately at the people coming out of the pod. I could barely see them but I could hear them screaming in rage at the sudden death of so many of their friends and colleagues, promising to the invaders they would pay with their lives. But it was clear they simply weren’t enough, and their improvised defenses already had a huge hole in the middle. They were falling back really quickly, trying to use whatever remained of the desks as cover.

“Stand your ground!,” Enasir screamed, “do not abandon cover!.” I couldn't see her, but I recognized her voice.

Next to me Oakley and the others were desperately searching the bodies of the dead Jabru soldiers. Oakley grabbed a gun but she saw it was useless: one of the bullets of the ADS had incrusted itself right on the barrel. Enlil had done it on purpose, he saw the gun with the cameras and decided to spend one bullet neutralizing it too just in case something like this happened.

There were screams darting through the sounds of bullets hoping to be heard. Orders were being given, medics were pleaded for. It seemed to me the invaders had already taken about half the room, but it was hard to say with all the white smoke filling the air.

There was a group of soldiers right in front of us, taking cover in what remained of one of the desks. I don’t know why they didn’t come to take cover with us, perhaps they were so focused on fighting they didn’t focus on surviving. I wonder if that makes them good or bad soldiers. Regardless, they decided to stand up and run towards an intact desk a couple of meters ahead, probably because they hoped to stop the enemy advance there, but the important thing is that one of them was shot in the head before he made it there, and he fell close enough that Oakley was able to reach his feet and drag his body to us.

She took the soldier’s rifle and she pointed it to Jun. Jun raised his hands and she shot at the metal bar connecting the cuffs in his hands, destroying it.

With his hands now free Jun took the rifle and shot the metal bar connecting the cuffs in his feet, and before I could even react with six quick shots he had broken the metal bars connecting the cuffs around all of our feet and hands.

Oakley took a handgun from the soldier and gave it to Sarrat.

“Do the same, be careful, don’t follow us,” she instructed them.

At first I was outraged Jun had shot in my direction without even warning me first but then… I don’t know… I guess I started having fun.

“Come,” Jun said.

We crawled towards a pile of metal and dead bodies behind the group of soldiers who had run in front of us, they didn’t seem to have noticed one of them had died, they were hyper focused on using their position to stop the enemy advance. 

“Was this your plan?,” I asked Jun. I had to scream and even then I could barely hear my own voice.

“What?, no!… was it yours?.”

“No.”

“I do have a plan now though.”

He peaked over what remained of someone’s leg to see the four soldiers ahead of us. The white smoke swirling between us and them. We were hunting, I could remember how it felt to hunt. He sighed slowly and when the air had left his lungs he made four quick shots and those four soldiers were dead.

“Run!,” he told us. “I am dizzy!,” he screamed as he stood up and ran towards the invaders, “dizziness!, dizziness!.”

Sagira, Oakley and I followed him, running for just a second before taking cover again behind another desk, one being used by the invaders for cover.

Jun laid on the floor with his hands on his head and we did the same.

“We are not with them!,” he screamed, “we were prisoners!, I am dizzy!.”

“I have pills for that,” one of the invaders replied and immediately Jun’s attitude changed.

The invader came to us and he took off his helmet. It was Khalfan.

“What the fuck are you guys doing here?,” he asked quickly, he was not happy to see us, he wanted answers.

“We were about to be executed,” Sagira replied.

“Good timing then,” Khalfan reflected, “anything you know that I should know?.”

“She has a military A.I.,” I replied.

“What?!,” Jun, Oakley and Sagira asked at the same time.

“Yes, we suspected that, why are you sure?”

“I spoke with it.”

“Useful intel,” he put again his helmet and looked at Oakley, she had been hit in the forearm but because of the adrenaline she hadn’t noticed until then.

Then Khalfan grabbed a small plastic pack form a pocket in the armor plating of his legs, ripped it open and poured it on Oakley’s arm where it quickly solidified resembling skin and stopping the bleeding.

“Medical sealing from before the Silence,” he explained and went back to firing.

Then another one of the invaders came to us, and I could see she was wearing armor like the Jabru soldiers, but slightly different. She had to be a soldier from Jasso Station.

“Take,” she said, giving us hand guns. Jun immediately took it and started firing, Oakley and Sagira did the same a moment later. I wanted to join them.

“I don’t know how to use it,” I lied.

“Point and shoot at what you want to kill,” she replied and then went back to shooting.

Point at what I wanted to kill… Enasir. That fucking monster of a person, who knew how many more people she had killed?, smiling afterwards, completely sure she had done justice. But she was well defended behind those desks in the stage. Even worse, the metal disk now served a new added defense.

Jun stopped shooting to reload.

“The enemy has clustered to the sides of the improvised citadel,” he informed us, “they are well positioned.”

Well positioned was an understatement. Since the disk had tore up through the middle of the room the desks at the sides were mostly intact, specially at the back. Their position there served to prevent any flanking to the desk citadel in the middle, and at the same time the desk citadel served to protect the soldiers at the sides from being overrun.

Then a soldier from Jasso Station also stopped to reload and spoke to Khalfan.

“Sir, we should use the explosives.”

“We need Enasir if we hope to deactivate her A.I.”

“She's in the desk citadel,” Oakley told him.

“She is?,” Khalfan was pleasantly surprised, “bring it,” he ordered the Jasso soldier and he handed him a special pack of ammunition.

Khalfan loaded that new ammunition and changed a few settings in his rifle. He shot once and the result was like a grenade explosion rippling through the strands of smoke remaining in the air. It caused a lot of damage on the right wing of the defenses, leaving the desks charred and distorted, probably burning to the touch.

“Shot at the wall behind them,” I told him, “the explosion will reach them. Don’t destroy their defenses, destroy them.”

I couldn’t see Khalfan’s expression behind his helmet, but the way he paused for a moment and then did exactly what I said made me think he respected me for a second there… and then I thought that shot had probably killed a few people, and I wondered if I was guilty of their deaths.

“Don't shoot left!,” I screamed, suddenly remembering Sarrat and her tribe were still hiding in the hallways just before the barrier. “There are civilians there!.”

“Tough luck,” he replied and was going to shoot, but then Jun grabbed his shoulders and pushed him down.

“Don’t.”

And Khalfan didn’t. Instead he shot a few more times to the right flank completely obliterating it.

“Hey!,” he said to the Jasso soldiers around us and then he made a couple of hand gestures which meant: “You stay here with this guy (Jun).“

Then he moved to the right where other soldiers were just reloading. Oakley, Sagira and me followed him.

“You stay here and protect our retreat if the assault fails,” he told us, then he whispered to the Jasso soldiers as they finished reloading, “we will flank the desk citadel, the others will keep the left flank occupied.“

Then he and the soldiers ran to the defenses they had just cleared and immediately got attacked with a wall of bullets. There were more soldiers in that citadel than we had imagined, but Khalfan and his soldiers were wearing armors, the others weren’t… I am not sure how long that assault lasted. It could have been ten minutes, or ten seconds. I was just there watching how they desperately tried to break through their defenses… then one soldier knelt and released the latches in his armor, spilling a mixture of medical sealing and blood, even form his helmet, and he fell to the ground. Another soldier received a shot in the helmet and for some reason that was the bullet that finally made it through. She stopped firing and you could tell by how she moved that she was screaming in agonizing pain, but the sounds were muffled by her helmet. Another soldier just had to stop when he saw medical sealing spilling from the armor around his hands and fingers, he had not even noticed the blood spilling from his chest.

Every soldier there was dying in a different way. Eventually the bullet impacts became too much for the armor to handle and they got wounded. The armor released medical sealing on the wound, but it had its limits and they were well beyond them.

Khalfan retreated, dragging one soldier and being followed by those that could still walk, but then UNUM soldiers began coming out of the desk citadel and continued firing. Oakley and Sagira began shooting, trying to force the UNUM soldiers into cover and give Khalfan and the others time to retreat, but they were not enough. Reluctantly I joined them, shooting at their legs and feet. I’m pretty sure I destroyed someone’s knee, I saw it burst into blood and bone shards. Regardless, we three weren’t enough. 

As the right flank retreated from the failed assault the UNUM soldiers at the left flank also began to advance.

The Jasso soldiers that had come from pod were far fewer than the UNUM soldiers in that room. They had relied in their surprise attack and their armors to give them the advantage they needed. Now it was clear it had not been enough. The armors were reaching their limits, medical sealing began dripping from their fingers and elbows. Meanwhile the UNUM soldiers had recovered from the surprise attack incredibly quickly. They had organized and they had resisted the enemy, now it was their time to counter attack.

We were falling back to the pod, taking turns to retreat and to cover the retreat of the others. I hated to admit it, but Douglas had taught me a few useful things. I prayed he would never find out.

Khalfan switched his rifle back to use the explosives, but they weren’t nearly as useful as before because now the UNUM soldiers were more scattered around the room as they pushed us back.

“Sir, we have to do it now,” a soldier pleaded Khalfan. Khalfan looked at Jun. 

“I’m sorry, you were never supposed to be here,” then he took a device, pressed a button and I heard a weird noise coming from behind, form the pod.

The UNUM soldiers had finally stopped as we took some pretty good defensive positions near the pod. There weren’t so many of them anymore. I thought we may be able to change the tide of the battle one more time, I was ready to try. But then something snapped all the guns out of our hands. It felt like something impacted my gun and threw it off my hand. I looked at the gun in the floor: there was a bullet incrusted in the barrel.

“We surrender!,” I screamed as I went out of cover and I confirmed my fears. The guns mounted to the walls all over the room were pointed at us, Enlil had retaken control of the room. We had lost.

The others slowly had the same realization I did as they saw their unusable guns in the floor. At first they were angry at me for surrendering, but then the had to agree there was nothing else to do but to die.

And then there was finally silence, there was finally peace. The room was full of rubble, dying soldiers and scattered body parts, but there was a certain excitement to being alive after it all. A part of me wanted to do it again.

I had to remind myself all those people had lives and they all expected to be alive tomorrow. I tried to basque myself in their suffering and silence the cruel parts of my soul, as I had learned long ago.

Enasir finally left her fortress, tainted in blood and holding a rifle. She walked towards us, crossing right through the path the metal disk had made.

Khalfan took off his helmet to greet her.

“Hello, Admiral,” he said.

“Mikaeli!…” she stopped for a second but then resumed her triumphant march. “I am so disappointed,” she said. “You finally had your chance to kill me and you missed your shot. What was that stupid assault of yours?, you only attacked one flank!. Did I taught you nothing?.”

“Admiral there are many wounded…” a soldier told Enasir.

“It can wait,” she shut him up.

Khalfan (whose real name was apparently Mikaeli) laughed a little, it was quiet but it still felt deep and booming, like an explosion from far away.

“My first demand is that you order your Artificial Intelligence to self destruct,” he replied.

“Demand?,” she asked, rhetorically. Her remaining soldiers were pointing at all our heads, but more importantly, Enlil was pointing at us. “This is a textbook case of unconditional surrender.”

“It’s not, because the pod is a bomb set to explode if my heart stops. If we can’t capture you we’ll still take you with us.”

“I see, I see,” Enasir even smiled as the situation unraveled in her mind, “well, I don’t believe you, so I’m gonna kill you anyway, and if it happens that you were telling the truth then my successor will take control of Enlil and the fight will continue. You will have accomplished nothing.”

She took a handgun form her hip and pointed it at Khalfan, both of them had wicked smiles in their faces.

“Admiral, no!, please stop!,” her soldiers pleaded and I began to laugh out loud.

Maybe you should have been there to understand, but the idea of surviving all of that just for all of us to die anyway was honestly hilarious in that moment.

Then Izumi rushed to her side. She was bleeding profusely from one side of her face, I think she lost an eye.

“Grand Admiral, there’s no need to kill him, that’s exactly what he wants. He couldn’t kill you so now he wants you to kill yourself. I know you hate him, but please don’t play his game. You can kill him some other time with no risk to you.”

Enasir closed her eyes, breathed deeply and lowered her gun.

“Thanks Izumi.”

It happened too fast. We heard another shot and when I looked I saw Jun had taken Enasir’s gun and he was holding it to Khalfan’s head. Jun was bleeding from his arm because Enlil saw the movement and tried to stop him, but apparently Jun had prevailed over the pain and the damage to his arm and he had succeeded in pointing the gun at Khalfan.

“That was fun!,” he said, “your name is Enlil, right?,” he screamed to the room in general, knowing Enlil was listening. “You wanna play again Enlil?, to see who’s faster?.” He waited for a second. “Does anyone else want to play?, kill me before I kill Khalfan and we see if his bluff was real?.”

“I bet you one Pope he’s not bluffing,” I said to Enasir. She looked at me for a second, but then she ignored me again.

“You are Jun, right?,” she asked Jun. "I’m not surprised you survived, specially considering who your father was. I met him a couple of times, you know?.”

“Text book hostage negotiation,” Jun replied, a small stream of blood flowing backwards through his arm towards his chest, dripping from his elbow.

"Teach me,” Okaley asked. She and Sagira had been to kneel nearby by the soldiers.

“First step is to find common ground,” Khalfan replied.

“Oooooh!,” we mockingly replied, like if we were in school or a lecture or something.

“Yes, it is a hostage negotiation,” Enasir admitted, “and you know how those end, let’s change that.”

“Oh, she’s good,” Jun told Khalfan, smiling form ear to ear.

“If you kill Mikaeli maybe nothing happens,” Enasir continued, “maybe he was bluffing just so I wouldn’t kill him.”

“Would you do that Khalfan?,” Jun said in a mocking tone of voice, like if he was a misbehaving dog. “Would you make me kill you just for a bluff?.”

“Well… you’ll have to find out!,” he replied in a similar tone of voice.

“It would be too funny either way,” I said to myself and again we laughed a little.

“I hope you are not bluffing,” Sagira said being kinda serious, “I don’t wanna live without my ship.”

“You are never gonna get your ship back,” I teased her, “because you never get The Joke!.”

And we finally bursted out laughing.

“Good one Jacob,” Kahlfan admitted.

“How is her ship related to her sense of humor?,” Enasir asked.

“Because that’s The Joke!,” we all replied in unison and we laughed again.

By this point everyone else, including the other Jassol soldiers, were super confused. One of them tried to move to help a wounded soldier who was moaning but Jun put the gun touching Khalfan’s head and almost pressing the trigger.

“No,” he ordered that soldier, and that soldier didn’t move as the wounded soldier behind him continued to suffer. “She said the wounded could wait, didn’t you Admiral?.”

“Hey Jun, I just thought of something, according to Enasir you are just threatening to treat Khalfan humanely!.”

“Oh yeah, you are right!,” Sagira remembered.

“What?,” Khalfan asked.

“I'll explain you later,” Jun replied.

“No you won't!,” Oakley said and we laughed again as we remembered that either way Khalfan would be dead.

“That's right,” Jun replied, “just before you arrived the Admiral killed this beautiful man named Gemil and she called it ‘humane treatment’. I actually went to Gemil’s cousin’s wedding or something.”

“When?.”

“Yesterday.”

“You guys were busy without me.”

Finally Enasir’s patience had run out. She looked around, she found a wounded soldier with a horrible gaping wound on her ribs, and she pressed it with her boot. Her screams were horrible and her voice was muffled by the blood and saliva pooling in her mouth.

“Pl… Adm…l,” she begged but Enasir kept pressing, filling the room with her horrible screams. Then she finally stopped and came back to us.

“Let's review the situation. You people can become my prisoners and live, or you may kill your friend and then maybe we all die. Either way it all goes to shit, do you want me to choose how?.”

Silence. I think we all could feel how our weird suicidal mood faded and Jun’s determination to kill his friend was evaporating. Suddenly it was too real, suddenly he was pointing a gun to his friend on the hopes we would all die too. Suddenly it was all too fucked up.

“I want to choose,” I said.

Everyone in the room looked at me. I could feel even Enlil’s attention on me.

“Now this I have to hear,” Enasir admitted.

“What is your goal Enasir?.”

“To reestablish the authority of the UN, so that people can live happy lives, like I did.”

“But the problem is that the United Nations needs to be made of nations, right?, and all those nations were destroyed.”

“Except perhaps the Vatican.”

“And that’s why you think you need me, but you don’t. You are the Secretary General, right?, well: Jabru and Jasso are nations, and so are the Jovian League, the Elbereth Swarm, the Librarians… sure, all those governments started as rebellions, but they were necessary during those years of chaos…”

“You are wrong, rebelling wasn’t necessary. If everyone had kept loyal then me and the other UNUM commanders would have brought back order in just a few months. Instead we had to loose or time and energy fighting to be obeyed, and loosing.”

“…Okay, maybe you are right, but we can’t deny the reality that all those governments exist now, their citizens recognize their authority, and they are stronger than you militarily.”

“It doesn’t matter if those warlords are strong, it doesn’t matter if people obey them. They are illegitimate by nature and their authority will always be fake.”

“But you are the Secretary General, if you accept those governments into the UN you would make them legitimate.”

“Don't be stupid. I can’t give them a seat in the General Assembly because they are not legitimate.”

“Then create something new, create a new branch of the UN…”

“A new branch?…”

“Yeah, the… uuuuh… Council of Truth and Reconciliation, whose goal will be to work with the rebel governments and bring them to a point where they can be accepted into the General Assembly.”

“I tried diplomacy many times before,” she said, tired, and for an instant she did seem like an old person. “But you are right, before I only had authority and legitimacy, but not the strength to back them up.”

I smiled. Her mind was making my own arguments for me.

“We are not like Enlil,” I replied.

“But… no. You are wrong. Look around you, they sent a diplomatic mission as a trick to confirm my location before a terrorist attack.”

“And you only wanted to execute people in front of the diplomats as a show of power.”

“What I did was completely legal…”

“The point is that neither side actually wanted to negotiate, but now you might actually negotiate for real.”

“They could,” Khalfan intervened, “if the diplomats had survived.”

“Oh, they are alive,” Enasir explained. “Before the attack started we dragged them to the improvised citadel to use them as hostage in case we were defeated.”

She turned back and whistled very loudly. Thandiwe and another soldier peaked over the citadel.

“Bring the enemy diplomats!,” she told them.

As the diplomats walked towards us you could see the horror in their faces as they witnessed the carnage, two of them vomited and I thought that it must be nice to feel the suffering of others so easily instead of having to constantly remind yourself of it. That’s what happens when you have a good life.

“Listen to him,” Enasir told them, pointing at me.

“Why is that man holding a gun to that other guy’s head?,” of the Jabru diplomats asked.

“If that guy dies that pod explodes and we all die,” I explained.

“We what?!,” they screamed. I shouldn’t have started there.

“But don’t worry we can actually solve this situation, and the broader situation that produced this battle and this war, if you guys just negotiate with the Secretary General.”

“We have heard your terms,” the bishop said, “you basically demand us to abolish our governments, to destroy everything we’ve built.”

“It’s different now,” Enasir explained.

“Look, I fucking hate Enasir,” I told them, “she is cruel, she cares about the law more than she cares about people… but she’s right about one thing. Humanity working together was a good thing, she just wants humanity to keep working together.”

“We won’t des…”

“I know!, she wanted you to destroy everything or she would destroy it herself, but now she sees there’s a third option. She will create a new branch of the United Nations and invite all the governments that formed after The Silence. Here you will all negotiate and work together to fix all the crimes that were committed since.”

Silence, they were thinking about it.

“Hey, Jacob,” Jun asked, “I have a question. Will everyone be invited to this thing?, even the slavers of New Babylon for example?.”

“They will,” Enasir replied, “but we will demand they free all their slaves. The UN will not tolerate slavery in any form. The same goes for the supremacists of New Albany, the cloners of Roslin and every group who is currently engaged in gross violations of human rights. For example,” she said looking at the diplomats of Jabru, “we would demand that Jabru stops using ethnic origins to decide which refugees they actually help.”

“That… could be possible,” one diplomat admitted, “if you accept we cannot help all refugees that come to our port.”

“The UN could find that understandable.”

Agreement, negotiation, the hope for peace. Humans doing what humans have always done.

“Now, about the threat to kill us all…” another diplomat asked.

“Enlil!,” Enasir said, “I order you to neutralize anyone who would use violence in this room against anyone while diplomatic mission is here. There, done. Now, Mister Wang, your are the only one Enlil can’t stop right now.”

“You will let us go free?,” Jun asked.

“Yes.”

“No,” I said, “you will let go all the prisoners you took during the battle. In their ships, with all their belongings, and you will give compensation to Gemil’s family.”

“I can let everyone go as you ask,” Enasir accepted, “but I won’t give any kind of compensation.” In her eyes I could see she would not budge on this point, that would be admitting she hadn’t done justice. I sighed.

“Fine.”

“Wait!,” Oakley nearly screams, “how can we know you’ll keep your word?. If Jun takes that gun away from Khalfan you can just kill us all or put us back in your dungeon. No, I’m not okay with this.”

“It's fine Oakley,” Khalfan assured us, “if nothing else, I trust her.”

Slowly Jun lowers his arm, and lets go of the gun. Only know we can see in how much pain he had been and continued to be.

“We need medics,” Enasir considers. Then we hear a voice coming form speakers hidden inside the walls.

“I have a team in the hallway who is close to removing the material blocking it,” Enlil informs us, calm as ever. “They'll be there in a few minutes, in the meantime I have identified the soldiers form both sides that are more likely to survive if they receive first aid right now.”

And so we followed Enlil’s instructions providing first aid to as many soldiers as we could. I wanted to find the soldier whose knee I blew up, but I couldn’t find him, and I was too afraid to ask about it. I assumed he just died and I wondered if I should have died instead of committing such horrible sins… or would that be the sin of suicide?.

As I tore my clothes to use as bandages for a wounded soldier I reflected on how I had acted so much like my past self during the fight, and how now I was acting like the person I wanted to be, the person I should be: a priest caring for the sick and wounded. It was tragic however that I had been the same person who made many of them sick and wounded in the first place.

I guess, even thought I wanted to think of the violent and cruel parts of me as “my past self,” I had to admit they never stopped being part of me, I never became a different person, I just developed new parts of my soul which I hoped would prevail over the rest, but this was a reminder those other parts would never leave.

It all served as a humbling lesson of the kind of influence I wanted to have in the world, and why.

Finally the UNUM soldiers managed to pass through the hallway. They had to melt the metal that substance had stuck to and remove the whole thing as a single block.

Someone who actually knew about medicine came to attend the person I was hunched over and I just moved to the side to let them work. I sat on the floor and I sighed, I was so tired.

In the corner of the room I could see Sarrat and her tribe being attended to. They were using small lanterns to check if their pupils dilated, they were giving them pills (tranquilizers I presume), and they were checking something in Dasis’ back, almost certainly his implant.

I thought about walking back to them, say something, but then I thought about Gemil’s face as Enasir sentenced him to death, and how it was my fault. I couldn’t face them.

I looked around the room. There were medics attending to Jun’s arm, to Oakley’s bullet wound, and even checking Sagira’s foot, I guess she got hurt and I didn’t notice. Then to my own surprise one of those medics came to me and began examining me.

He asked me if I was wounded, if I was bleeding, if any kind of movements hurt… and the answer to them all was “no.” To my own surprise once the blood was washed away it turned out that none of it was mine. I had no injury, I had suffered no damage. I had passed through the valley of death completely unscathed.

Now, there is a certain kind of religious people who likes to see the influence of God in everything that happens, specially in everything that happens to them. They pray for health or success or luck and when they get they know it’s the will of God. I was never like that, not even back then. 

Whenever something good happened to me and one of my fellow believers encouraged me to thank God for that blessing my thought was always “why didn’t this happen to someone who needed it more?.” Of course the answer then is the typical “God works in mysterious ways” but that didn’t convince me either. 

Instead it made more sense to me to think that some events are just luck, good or bad, and that God doesn’t intervene in everything that happens to us.

But in that moment, as I saw that bewildered medic trying to find something wrong with me, as I saw that room littered by dead people, I couldn’t help but feel that this was unfair.

Author’s Note:

If you are reading this, this means I haven’t uploaded the whole thing yet. Now, the whole thing is written, I wrote it during 30 feverish days for a contest which I lost, so I’ve been going over it and improving it a lot. Doing a bit more worldbuilding, improving the dialogues, setting up important plot points so they don’t come out of nowhere… Sagira and Oakley are one of my main concerns, they are the most prominent female characters and they never even spoke to each other in the original version.

My point is that, if you like this, I’m working on more, and if you don’t, I don’t just welcome criticism, I crave it. However, this is an incomplete story, up to this point you’d probably think I’m a super religious guy who loves the catholic church, but that’s not the case at all, you have to build an argument so you can tear it down (spoilers?, I mean, he does start by saying "I was a priest back then"). If you don’t like the character of Jacobo or where the plot is going, just consider this is incomplete, maybe at the end you will like it, or maybe at the end you still won’t like any of it, and that would be fine. I don’t have any negative feelings towards you and I hope you don’t have any negative feelings towards me for writing a bad book.

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