Chapter 3

When Deilen Koru first saw the armada enter the atmosphere, he had shuddered. What had seemed a swarm of tiny glowing specks covering a patch of the sky as big as his outstretched hand had suddenly grew into a blackened sky of metal, thrusters, landing lights, and an artificial dust storm. But now that he waited on the key landing pad with the rest of the committee to report to the general, a more poignant shudder found his spine. The sheer immensity of the flagship, Breath of Dawn, made him feel his insignificance desperately; he weighted one foot and then the other in an attempt to vent himself of this restless energy. The thing could well topple right over and crush him easily; far more easily than he could a fly with a swatter. And he knew his reaction time wasn't half that of the fly, and the space vessel more than several times larger than the swatter, proportionally speaking. If that near landing leg's hydraulics failed, there would be no escape.

And so Deilen fidgeted beside his comrades, who whispered together of the splendor of the prime ship in the Imperial Amrada. He intentionally sighed and unintentionally clasped his hands together. He supposed if he were the bearer of better news, this trip wouldn't be so uncomfortable. But again, had he good news, he wouldn't have been summoned. In fact, if there were only good news to report from the colony, he wouldn't have been on the “Committee for Inter-Communal Biochemical Affairs” in the first place.

“You nervous to meet him?” a big gruff voice came from the man next to Deilen. He wasn't an especially tall man, but barrel chested and stocky, bald with a short-trimmed beard. The man always spoke genuinely however, with no taste for pomp or circumstance. He had served with Deilen on the CICBA for the past year as the military representative—an artillery man on every day but Thursday afternoons.

“No. No, not really; just hate feeling so small,” Deilen answered, sniffling a bit and licking his lips.

“Amazing bird, though, isn't it?”

“As long as it doesn't fall on me.”

“I'm sure an engineer somewhere would scoff at that. Besides I'm not sure that it wouldn't be kinder of it to crush us anyway. Not when we're bringing....that,” he nodded with a suddenly serious frown at the manilla folder held by a rigid woman in a sleek, gray suit, “to the general. It's not going to be pretty, you know.”

“I know; but the facts are present and demand attention. The disease must be stopped.”

“Agreed, but someone is going to take a fall for this; for that I'm glad I'm on the committee who filed the report and not a subject of the report. It's one thing to witness the wrath of a general, quite another to take the brunt of it.”

“It's all rubbish; no one should take blame for an unforeseen outbreak. That is an inherent risk in transplantation of any species. Adaptation to an environment, as in our case, comes slowly; adaptation of the environment to us comes almost as slowly, as in the case of Belagare, but has other risks, too,” Deilen stated, looking at his feet to avoid vertigo as the elevator platform began to rise up the side of the ship.
“So you said. Many times. But if anything costs someone more money, they're going to want to know why and who is to blame. That's why this committee was formed; someone lost money. Now someone less important is going to pay for it. That's politics.”

“Which is why I came out here in the first place,” Deilen sighed.

“Oh I'm not saying I like it; it's all screwed up. That's the nice thing about working artillery—you just put the machine together, load the BAC's, and haul off and launch the damn thing wherever they tell you to point it. It's kinda like making your own thunderstorm. Hey, you should come down for a range test sometime, I'll show you around, introduce you to the boys. Can't let you fire the thing yourself, but you could certainly observe.”

Deilen's eyes and lips seemed to weigh the offer, decide against it without deliberation, and he answered, “I think I'll pass, thanks. I'd rather not rupture my eardrums. Or induce a heart attack.”

The husky man laughed well. “Fair enough. But if you change your mind, the offer is still open.”

With that Deilen looked back to his feet, clasped his hands, and tried not to think about how high up he presently was. He had never been incredibly comfortable with heights, but he seemed to notice just how much he didn't like in life after transferring to the colony. After all, if the Imperial Armada could afford to send drip plantations this many light years away, couldn't their engineers at least be able to produce enough hot water for a decent shower? Of course such a question was an absurdity next to calculating tempo-verse stress variables to these people; they were probably the sort raised on cold showers and oatmeal breakfasts and store-bought cookies.

But in the past few months of his new position on the planet, the strains of life on a colony planet seemed to squash his comfort zone uncomfortably closer to nothing, store-bought cookies hung in his imagination as a delightful reminder of life at home, on Earth. Fresh-baked seemed but a wisp of imagination floating just now before him, and if he tried too hard to think of it, it might vanish and never be caught again. But regardless, he coped. He hadn't complained about the cold floors in the compound, the yellow-brown of the walls, or the acrid smell that seemed to persist in the corridor between the heavy equipment repair shed and the psychiatric ward.

As the platform, which had, he noticed, only a rather short handrail around it, rose past what he imagined were ten stories in height, Deilen closed his eyes and imagined himself waiting for the ten o'clock phase train under the cool Birmingham skies in a short queue for a small trip for a half-hour tea. He had enjoyed this small perk of working for the Interior Ministry of Medicine; it was just enough of a break to catch his breath and a bit of the daily news at the Queen's Cafe, just one stop south along the Birmingham Metropolitan Phase Train. But the breeze was blowing the wrong way, and the image he held of the low-hanging red cover over Platform 12 dissolved into rows and rows of passing, almost mirror-like tiles. Every now and again, a porthole would interrupt the cascading stream of tiles, but fall quickly out of view.

Deilen wondered which crewman had the misfortune of rooming right under the captain's entrance, wondered if that unlucky person might have been looking out at him, if he might have been wondered who was riding the platform to meet the General and the Captain. Or if that crewman might not have noticed at all his ascension. In fact, it struck Deilen that he might be nearly invisible. Who, in all his trips on the 10 o'clock phase would have even blinked twice at his entrance? Who at the Queen's Cafe had ever remembered his order? Who, even now, would wake tomorrow morning and wonder who that man was, standing with several others, making the General frown?

The number had to be few, Deilen concluded. After all what was remarkable about him? He was merely a 5'10” slim-waisted, bony-shouldered, thirty year-old man. He kept himself clean shaven only because he couldn't grow a full beard and didn't look good in a mustache, and wore dress shirts inside and outside of the work place if only because he thought tee shirts made him look too young—mostly because they hung on him more than fit him. The only difference between the relaxing and working Deilen Krou was a tie and top button buttoned.

But perhaps obscurity fit him better than any shirt had; he didn't mind the corner seats at the Queen's, and his hazel eyes kept quietly to himself. He neither regularly started conversations with strangers in the shopping queue nor felt obliged to meet another's eyes when walking down the street. Even at the pub, he sipped his pint of bitter and watched with interest the unfolding football match or the evening newscast, feet crossed at the ankles and always moving.

This fact Deilen hated to be known, and in the three times it had been mentioned in his professional career, he found himself most embarrassed, and had not taken it well, not once. The first had been in an interview for his former position, and the man who sat across the desk had noticed his whiskey glass shaking and had asked Deilen if he was the one doing that. He of course answered negatively, mentally kept his leg shaking, and quit some twenty seconds later. He nonetheless got the job, as the interviewer remarked that it must have been some machinery outside, and continued on, impressed by Deilen's high performance and solid recommendations from previous centers of employment.

The second time, an attractive HR girl had commented on his restlessness in jest, but it dealt such a blow to Deilen's pride that it never recovered.

The third occurrence came via Deilen's former nemesis, a fellow who claimed they were basically the same people, only that Deilen was introverted. Deilen disagreed vehemently, and when the man pointed out that he too, had a foot gone loony, the flush of color that rose to Deilen's face superbly matched the fire-extinguisher hanging on the wall.

Fortunately for Deilen, he had long ago learned to tame his jittery leg into simple foot exercises which he consciously performed every five minutes to keep his muscles moving and occupied. Of course, those only helped when sitting. But here he stood, however far too many stories above the ground and still rising. And times like these made it difficult for Deilen to stand still. And so he shifted his weight from one foot to the other; he balanced on one foot for a while, then switched. Not that one could tell, looking at him, that he might have rivaled a flamingo for balance. He just only lifted a foot from the floor—he might have simply had a leg longer than the other, or a slight misalignment in the hips, nothing visible to the casual eye—that largely missed the whole of Deilen anyway—could be seen on such a day as this.

However, when the rising platform came to a sudden halt, Deilen, lost in deliberation on the past and present, nearly toppled over, as he had been standing solely on his left foot at the time. He glanced at his companions discreetly, and it seemed that their sense of balance had been somewhat skewed as well and the quick stop had evicted the same, semi-embarrassed reaction: a sudden straightening of the spine and jacket, quick glances left and right, a nervous pull of the hand at the collar, or a scratch of the nose. Indeed, it seemed as if his colleagues were too far caught up in preserving their own little worlds, that no one noticed his slight tilt and arm wave to catch his balance.

When the hatch in front of them slid open, darkness first greeted them—and then music. But an odd sort of tune it was, like a mix between jazz and something with a bit of folk to it, but almost like a remix performed in one of London's premier rave clubs. Almost. But what all seven of them didn't expect was that it seemed to grow louder, and then to subside, as if it were moving away to their left. As their eyes adjusted, they found the inside was actually lit quite well; Deilen thought it reminded him of one of the many botanical gardens back in England. He had pictured ducking through hatches and squeezing through narrow corridors like a submarine. But what greeted him were large, fanning ferns, giant, prismatic columns, translucent walkways and offices above the main level, and everywhere light rebounded off mirrors and through the ship—he wasn't sure he could find a man-made light in the place. Giant skylights through floors above him allowed the light to cascade through this receptive and reflective maze of the ship.

But he caught his assumptions and held them tight; he looked at his feet. The walkway he stood on was as opaque as obsidian—warm, but solid. All around him, only everything above him allowed the light to penetrate. But what about those many stories of the ship below him; perhaps those were the common man's stations; perhaps those were more like the submarine quarters he imagined. Perhaps only the men of high rank were allowed in this arboretum of a command deck.

While Deilen took all of this in, a uniformed man strode towards them; it seemed as though he either walked briskly to get to something or away from something. He stopped suddenly several yards from their meandering party, greeted them, and asked that they follow him to the General's conference room. Deilen missed all this of course and the artilleryman grabbed at his sleeve and nodded his head towards the uniformed man now walking as though a devil were following him at a distance, but might pounce at any moment.

After wandering through a veritable jungle, with waterfalls of light and liquid, trees of bark and leaves and crystal columns, the small party came to a set of sliding glass doors surrounded by flowing greenery. The uniformed escort pressed his palm to a glistening pad on the doors, stepped back, and bid them farewell and good luck. When the doors slid apart, the light from within the room was nearly blinding; each squinted a bit or put their hand to their eyes.

A voice like a song welcomed Deilen personally, by name—but somehow seemed to neglect the others—until Deilen glanced and found each compatriot equally entralled with the being of light glowing in the center of the perfectly round room. Then he discovered he heard the voice, but wasn't actually listening to it. The song seemed to linger behind the small trickle of water that came from a fountain that formed the circumference of the room, underneath the nervous shufflings of feet, above their own breathing lungs and beating hearts. And yet there before them, something moved, addressing them, soothing them. And yet, Deilen could remember no particular phrase, no sentence structure to the language. The words, more poetry than speech, more song than poetry, more etheral notes than song, more like the ideas themselves in their purest most beautiful form pressed themselves to Deilen's mind, and he understood. He had been welcomed to the flagship, thanked for his time and efforts, and encouraged in his tasks ahead. Then Deilen understood that the presence in the room could not stay for the full report, but that his General would act accordingly and inform him of the situation. But not in such vulgar terms. And then, he had been wished the fondest farewell he had ever remembered, as if the world itself would hardly bear their separation.

But before anyone could respond, the light in the room vanished and the presence had gone, lingering only in the vault of their memory, burning within them. Each turned to each in wonder, trying to ask the questions that each new had already been answered. Only one of their number had a decidedly different reaction; a rather average-sized middle aged man who represented the economics division on the committee. His face, which some might have called pudgy, was ashen and completely hollow, as if he'd seen the devil himself.