*****
Supreme Commander Traxis had given me some time off after the tortured children’s rescue, which I spent answering to the media about the awful feral prison experiments, and even signing autographs. We never did find out how they’d kidnapped those kids. Was there someone amongst us on the enemy side? And of course, Ikanya and I had put our time together to good use. We’d laid awake nights from the poor boy’s screaming; we must’ve accidentally done something right, in our sleep.
After this little erstwhile vacation, one blessed announcement of my family’s invigorated life, it was straight back to the battle fields. This time we fought over the devastated planet Ronson, which the Dracs now savagely held captive. There were few living Ronsonians, and we didn’t hold out much hope for them. We kept attempting find and rescue missions, to no avail. We fiercely battled, coming very close to losing the planet to superior forces. But we fought on, undyingly, in the relentlessly scorching heat. It was enough to affect anyone’s judgment, and I was far from immune from such desert abandonment.
Early one morning, before the twin suns were up, I ran down the dried-up banks of the Green Moon River, towards a rocky escarpment. I thought I was spying out Dracs. As I ran, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the summer doldrums were on full blast, with not even the faintest whisper of a breeze. What had been the simmering kettle of an absurdly glorious morning, given the wastelands created by the Dracs, had become the boiling cauldron of a wetly molten afternoon. Yet the battle raged on, blindly, as in any other war. Was this one really just as unfair, just as mistakenly waged as our Earth wars had usually been, and was I finally waking up to that salient fact? Were we somehow misguided?
I had to rest. I took a moment to duck out of the glaring sun and into a darkened cave, tired and worn from baking like an apple in that oven of a desert. It was extremely hot and stuffy inside the cave, but at least it was shady. I raised my visor, wiping my face, and realized that I’d been wounded, shot in both arms by a laser rifle. I began to treat my injuries, as taught by the female Kel medics.
My vain attempts at comfort fled as I saw three large devils approaching the cave’s entrance, armed with flame throwers, jabbering away to each other in Draconian. They must have smelled the blood that dripped from my wound, and were drawn directly to me. They knew who and what I was! Dropping bandages, I gripped my laser rifle tightly, fell to the ground, and fired three shots, one right after the other. If I missed just one, I was a dead meat. In spite of the heat, my aim was fantastic, and all that was left was smoking lizard shit.
One of the monsters was a Drac Commander, not unlike me. I proudly ripped the gold chain from around his scaly throat, placing it around mine as I shakily strolled through the smoking ruins of that infernally hot planet. Now I had a proper war souvenir to give my good wife, to remember me by when my aim was finally sloppy.
The desert heat made the horizon violently shimmer. Beyond the sand dunes lay an old, abandoned Ronsonian building, from the looks of it a museum or library once, now empty for time immemorial. Ducking inside to wrap my wound, fearing lurking Dracs would kill me, I found instead one of my best warriors, Yak, the youngest in the group I now commanded. He was worse than mortally wounded; his entire midsection was weirdly and surgically removed, by what, I couldn’t fathom. How was he even alive? It was only a matter of moments.
I cradled him in my bleeding arms. Over and over, he cried, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die!”
The very next day, at a mass funeral held on Calarian, I gave a eulogy speaking of this boy’s heroism and honour. His mortal sacrifice and valour were what saved the planet Ronson that day, I very solemnly intoned, as the Kels wretchedly sobbed into their sleeves. The truth is always the most painful aspect of our reality, I realized. For the first time in years, I wondered to myself about the moral righteousness of the Kel’s cause. Were we just as blind and stupid as the lizards?
Were we, in some way hidden and unknown to me, well, evil?
My beautiful, brave wife now stepped up to the podium, her head held high. Overcome with emotion, I could only hug her. She read off the names of those killed in the battlefield for the entire past week, over three hundred men, as it had been a particularly bloody stretch.
Later, I whispered in her velvety ear, “Thank you for being so kind and compassionate. It’s not just your hair; your very heart is entirely composed of the purest gold.” I thought she’d like my words.
“Don’t ever say that,” she whispered back. “Your hair is not gold-coloured, but your heart has always been exactly the same as mine.” Apparently, in spite of the Kel’s general blondness, they were not racist; a part of me was thus secretly relieved of a heavy burden.
In the months that followed, my wife’s already large, normally flat belly began to grow, swelling quite profoundly. I started doing all the housework. The Kel culture didn’t use servants or maids, and you had to pull your own weight, unless you were very disabled. My wounds had healed, and I set to, even with the little energy I had left after a long day in the battlefield. I’d been elevated to Head Major Commander, so I didn’t have to actually fight in person anymore, but I usually waded in with the rest of them anyway. I was needed. And I still managed my chores every evening, while a cranky Ikanya chided my mannish incapability. I couldn’t seem to do anything right.
Boy, was it ever worth it!
In the spring, our glorious ball of wonder, Tirana, was born, looking every inch like her mother, though her hair was more a straw colour, not richly golden like Ikanya’s. And for some reason she was sickly at first, and we almost lost her. But then she rallied, and by the time she was two, there was a definitively Kellarian glow in her chubby twilight cheeks. After two years of limping around, she was able to run and horse with the other children, when the boys played soldier, and the girls pretended to nurse them and dress their wounds. This form of activity was more dead serious practice than mere kid’s playtime, unfortunately. But at least our Tirana was a girl, and not predestined to die in a barren pile of dirt, like her daddy.
On a lazy winter day, and for no particular reason, Tirana was barely playing with the antique music box Ikanya had gifted me when we first married. As she wound it, the charmingly melancholy melodies brought me back to a happier time, when I had first started out with all my dreams of fortune, death, and ecstasy, on a new world and in a new time. I smiled dreamily at my little girl, knowing I must cherish every minute spent with her and my wife. The battle front afforded me precious little time to spend with them, as tedious battle strategies now consumed every waking moment of my hard-working existence.
That night, we three gathered together on the balcony, and we watched as our brilliant little girl tried to count all the equally brilliant stars. What was out there that the Dracs needed so much, I vaguely wondered. Our empire was always trying to enlist support from any inhabited planet we found, warning them about the slavers’ threat.
I began singing to Tirana, “Star light, star bright, Daddy loves his star tonight,” and I hugged her tightly. She beamed up at me, and impishly replied, “Star loves her Daddy, too.” My eyes twinkled with tears. Ikanya brought us all a hot chocolate. We sat, and drank well.
Another night, our little girl came into our bedroom while we two were sleeping. She climbed up and whispered “Daddy, I’m scared, there are shadows in my room.” And then she added “and I’m lonely.”
My wife smiled, and I knew there was nothing to do but give in. “Then why don’t you stay here, with us?” With a beaming grin on her openly innocent face, our little angel crawled under the sheets.
In the morning, I watched her sleeping for a long time, feeling very grateful indeed. She was so sweetly beautiful, clearly down from Heaven. Our union had been blessed, all of my dreams richly fulfilled.
But the war was getting steadily worse. I knew this well, from my strategic duties in the field. My troops were almost gone. We had tried very hard to keep what few men we ha
d. I’d been promoted to Head Major General, and had been given a lovely three-bedroom house. But it couldn’t contain the restlessness and helplessness I always felt.
Once again, it was just another day. I went off to the front as usual; nothing extraordinary happened. It was dull and dreary, and I couldn’t keep down the stale old rations and the liquid nourishment from my canteen. Something was different, something was weirdly wrong.
When I got home, my wife and child were gone. I knew they’d been kidnapped by the Dracs, who had rumoured methods of using certain traitorous Kels, unknown spies who’d been promised prestige and life by the Draconian Empire. These subhuman traitors had enticed my family into a vehicle, and taken them to the Drac Territories. They were somewhere out there, lost and alone, and I was so important now, they’d show them both absolutely no mercy. Immediately, I flew back into the battle, leading my troops deep into Drac-held areas. We checked out three different planets, which took over a week, and we fought harder than we’d ever fought before. But there was no sign of my wife and child. We rescued a few other people, but not them.
There was a chill in the air, making my panic even worse. We marched on the planet Ronson finally, through the cold of the twilight. With an ever-impending sense of doom, finally, we found them.
They’d tortured my little girl with incredible ferocity, before finally killing her. Then I saw an unspeakable horror beyond Hell, or any possible description. It was the thing that was left of my wife.
I cried a river of tears, then suddenly stopped. The fright had left me entirely. The vast emptiness of space hollowed out my insides, engulfing me in a black, starless cloud. There was no such entity as love in this sick universe. It was beneath time, further along than space...
Beyond all Time, beyond even Space. What did that mean?
Our Supreme Commander, Traxis the Great, approached me with some overdue caution, as I appeared absolutely insane. But I was really just standing there, deathly still, feebly lost in thoughts of suicide.
He told me to take all the time I needed to recover. Recover?
“Use the time machine. Go back to Earth, visit your folks, and when you’re ready, only then come back.” The time machine–?
“I don’t want to fight anymore,” I replied weakly. My heart was haunted by the thought of killing anyone for any reason, ever again.
“You’ve personally slain over a thousand Dracs. They did that horrible deed to your family because of your virtuous, loyal service to us. Retire if you like, and draw yourself a pension.”
Mental disability, the women doctors said. So I did.
A year later, I finally gave up the struggle of holding out. I decided to kill myself, having nothing to live for; I would have to die slowly, painfully, and ingloriously, after what I’d done to my family.
I would jump off the Qumran Bridge, an old relic leftover from bygone days of glory on the once-industrious planet of Ronson, where we’d found my loved ones, at which point my life had come to an end. I would linger where they’d perished, completely isolated from any hope.
And far away from the damned time machine! I didn’t even know where it was anymore, having lost its location years ago. Thank Yahway that such a temptation was stolen from me! I didn’t even deserve to go home, to the wretched old planet of Earth I’d originally fled, seeking my fortune, life, and nobility. What good was leaving the best place that ever existed, without being able to defend it anymore? I had doubted our noble cause, and not upheld the virtues of love and honour. I was too cowardly to fight the Dracs, and they were winning anyway.
We were ruthlessly, quickly overwhelmed, losing planet after planet. There was no hope left, yet of course the Kels and others bravely continued to fight, probably to the very end. I was retired, so it wasn’t really desertion, but even that thought came to me. Though there was nothing I could do but pray to Yahway, or maybe even to God, it felt like I was deserting the Kels, and the entire universe. I was just like the damn Draconians, which I’d known all along. I wasn’t good enough to be a Kel warrior. Clearly, I deserved anything at all that happened to me.
What good was War, what price my wretched honour? My family had paid it in full. Now I must pay, too.
I stole an old space bus, took it to a deserted area of Ronson where even the Dracs never went, and marched several sandy, sweaty miles to the bridge, rusting and shimmering verdantly greenish under the molten sun. I would fall, break my body, and probably suffer for hours, which I clearly deserved, having thought things over carefully.
At the top of the bridge, I took one final breath, absurdly hopeful in the moment of my final reckoning that somehow there could be an end to the pain. Though I knew it was cowardly, I prayed to anyone listening that there would be. Then I took my dive, falling forever, and landed with a pronounced THUD! That scattered sand around my body.
Against my prayers, I lived! Writhing painfully in the sun-blackened sands, hideously hot, but so broken I couldn’t feel it at first, after some time I finally settled down, gasping. The pain was impossible to bear, beyond all human suffering. But I remembered what I’d done, my final plans to atone for a reckless life filled with guilt and stupidity. Though my every bone was broken, I would fulfill them.
I’d strapped powerful post-nuclear explosives to my back. They were on a timer, and in about three hours an explosion would rock the planet, destroying all Drac outposts and any chance they could hold the irradiated deserts anymore. The Ronsonians were all dead, or suffering unspeakably, so it didn’t matter. This was my last act of desperation, one calculated to cover up my disappearance mostly, not to further my good reputation. I hoped to go down in history as an insane fool.
Screaming and crying uncontrollably, begging the God I vaguely remembered and the Yahway I had pledged my soul to for the blessed peace of death, I began to crawl on my bleeding belly. Through a time unendingly long, I suffered, and was almost glad of it, due to my supreme mental anguish. Seemingly hours later, I finally despaired.
I wasn’t going to die. I had gone to Hell, forever, like I deserved. Looking straight at the blasting sun, I let it melt my eyes out, like the Draconians had always wanted. For I was one of them.