Chapter 16
Remy stood between two of the trenches, sealed in his armored suit, with Ares by his side. “I’m ready to return,” he announced in his radio to Anders overhead.
“Can you stand by for about ten minutes,” his ally requested back. “Colonel Fortune requested another cargo pod. I’d like to make the transport at the same time so I don’t have to bring down the inhibitors.”
“Understood.” Remy switched the frequency on his radio to the one Ares was using. He turned to his escort to find the man staring off into the horizon. It was a long way from the battle, so he tapped the shoulder to find out what he was looking for.
“Did you know,” Ares offered wistfully, “this used to be a green world with lots of water and air? There were trees here. Entire forests of trees. No insects or predators to worry about. Viruses didn’t develop here. It was almost paradise. The air might have been heavy on the hydrogen and helium and the carbon dioxide, but there was oxygen. We could breathe in a pinch. With a little tweaking, we could have made it a second Earth.”
Remy looked out, imagining the hills and rolling fields that once existed here. There was so much space, Earth could have colonized this world. Overpopulation plaguing some of the nations could have been solved had such a world been nurtured instead of destroyed layer by layer.
“What about the gravity,” Remy asked. With the extra work his legs had gotten since he touched down on this planet, he imagined he could now break some squat records back home.
“That could have been a problem,” Ares admitted. “They say this world was 2.2 times the size of Earth. It was hard for us at first, but you adapt like anything else. Yes, it was beautiful here and we stripped away everything; the trees, the plants, the water, the air.”
“What do you do with it all?”
“When the storage bays fill up, the blender creates these massive cargo ships in orbit. All the material is sent to the ships and the ships head off to some preprogramed destination. When they get there, the ships are supposedly offloaded and dematerialized. The whole thing is automated and none of us know for sure this stuff gets where it’s going, but you have to wonder.”
Ares trailed off as if the barren landscape around him had captured his thought and trapped it within the desolation he shared responsibility for. It was as if the profundity of his coming observation had been upstaged by this shrinking world and the angry message it had waiting for him beneath the thin crust.
Remy hoped to jumpstart his thought process by trying to complete his wonderings. “You wonder how the magma hasn’t blown the thin layer of rock out into space?” It was one of those mysteries that had been in the back of his mind. Not more important than the conflict among the inhabitants that Remy ever felt the need to ask before, but he had time now. Ares had brought up their work, so he figured it was as good a chance as he was going to get to satisfy his curiosity.
“No, we don’t wonder that. Like you saw us do with the trenches, we’ve drilled release holes across the planet. We’ve given the magma chamber a way to release the pressure safely. No, what I wonder…what a lot of us have been wondering is what they do with all this material. We’re talking planetary scale resource allocation here. You can’t just dump everything we’ve taken onto a single world. And no one needs this much raw material to build ships and colonies.”
Ares had a point. His observations got Remy thinking. Someone said they were developing the next class of scrambler to manipulate entire worlds, but they were not there yet. The Republic couldn’t have a need for an entire planet’s worth of minerals. And they had more than that if Dirk was right about this going on throughout the galaxy.
“Where is it all going,” he mumbled to himself, forgetting that everything coming from his mouth crossed the air waves to Ares’ helmet.
“Exactly!”
Remy had begun to feel so small as a single man trying to peel away the secrets of these governments, knowing he could be erased in a single flash of white. He had a duty to report back on what he was witnessing. The more he witnessed, the more dangerous his mission became. These were a hundred men trying to stand up for themselves, and he was one. He had no back up and no one he could truly trust aboard the Freedom. There was more going on than a few human rights violations. As much as his sense of duty and honor pushed him forward and drove him onward to the next secret, he sensed for the first time that this mission was too much for him. He had to focus himself on getting back to the UN and reporting on this single mission. In the safety of those chambers, he could push the ambassadors and other officials to get a larger inspection force in space. Ares’ musings on the bigger picture could not be his problem at this time.
Ares considered a case he had been carrying. Remy had noticed it when they left the complex, but thought nothing of it, suspecting it to be some supplies the guy might have needed or some contraption he was supposed to set up after he returned to the ship. He didn’t think it had anything to do with him, until Ares handed it over.
“I believe you genuinely want to help us, but there’s nothing you can do for us on this world. The military won’t listen to your diplomacy. Another gun on the front line will only buy us a few more seconds.”
“I can’t turn my back on this,” Remy protested. “Every part of my being tells me this is wrong.”
“It is, but you won’t make a difference staying here with us. I managed to copy our entire database onto a bunch of data chips. I want you to take them back to Earth and show everyone what they’re doing to us out here. Help us by telling your UN our story.”
Remy looked to the case with despair. Millions over the centuries had been needlessly slaughtered for a variety of justifiable reasons, despite the world telling itself for 270 years “never again.” Like the butchers with their own actions, it was easy for the world to justify turning its own back on the injustice. It was easy to downplay a genocide when other nations had nothing at stake. When no one wanted to stick their necks out to stop the suffering of innocent people, the mantra of “never again” quickly disappeared from the public consciousness.
Remy couldn’t turn his back on these miners, no matter how dangerous it might have been. But he couldn’t ignore the sense in Ares’ request. The sad acceptance of this job was that you couldn’t save everyone, no matter how hard you tried. Sometimes, the best thing for a victim is keeping yourself alive long enough to tell their story.
And yet it wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded to fulfill this last request. This data in his hands was the single, most valuable treasure in the entire universe at this time. If Colonel Freedom suspected he had it, those quarters would be stripped down to the bulkheads to search for it. Anyone who knew he had it could be tortured. Anders was already on the hook for helping him get to the complex behind his CO’s back. Knowing about the data in this case would put him in a whole new realm of danger.
This was worth it, Remy decided. He had to accept he couldn’t help the miners directly. Keeping this data safe and getting it back to Earth was his primary duty, and he would have to do whatever was necessary to protect it.
With Anders signaling his time on this world was finished, Remy pushed the button to bring the familiar flash of light around his being and unveiling his quarters when it let go. Anders turned from the computer to take in the mess of a man returned from below.
“I’m guessing you failed.” The Lieutenant learned all he needed to know about Remy’s efforts from the simple request of his XO, and from the reports coming to the bridge which he had been able to gain access to on the computer.
Remy removed his helmet and placed it on his bed. He set the case behind it, trying to be nonchalant so Anders wouldn’t suspect anything about it. But Anders was more interested in the battle than his charge’s personal effects.
“Geological surveys suggest the miners destabilized the entire region when they unleased the lava. The bridge has b
een picking up subtle tremors for the last hour. If they don’t already feel them, they will soon; and they will bring that whole complex down around them if they manage to hold out against Fortune.”
Remy couldn’t focus on his next step. Everything he had learned on the surface was fighting for dominance in his head. There was no focusing on a starting point for Anders; even if he opened his mouth, he doubted his words would make much sense bouncing around from one thing to another. He tried to keep the case center in his thoughts, to give himself an anchor around which to wind everything else. Eventually, the whole experience had wound itself into a single, coherent statement.
“You and I are in a lot of danger.”