A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire
28 Terran Standard Years Ago
It was XXXX, Towards Star Calendar, probably around February—he had no way of being certain—and Alan Chandrasekhar had made peace with his Terran Gods. He did not consider himself a religious man, but in light of the circumstances—what he considered his very likely death in the coming week—he decided to risk the hypocrisy if only so it gave him something to do as he watched his demise come around the corner. He prayed to Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu as described to him by his grandmother two decades earlier, when he was a toddler. He tried to seek harmony with the Tao, to embrace the natural non-action that he faced in his captivity. He contemplated the nature of Adi Parashakti, the supposed creator and mother of all that existed, and until he was comfortably certain he did not understand anything anymore than he had in his secular, cynical freedom prior to captivity.
Eleven months ago, then-Lieutenant Chandrasekhar had been aboard the USFS Free Virtue, a cruiser that was crippled during the Battle of Victoria, towards what he assumed was the end of the Terran-Ctarl War. It was an invasive strike from the 9th Expeditionary Fleet that was supposed to sever the supply lines to a Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial space fleet that was said to be overextended in its approach to Sentinel III, an otherwise valueless border world in the Ban Guild. Except, as usual, something went wrong. Most of the task force was annihilated, not by the Imperial Navy squadrons stationed to defend Victoria II, but by undiscovered planetary orbital guns. In effect, an intelligence failure had caused the loss of the Free Virtue, which was separated from the rest of the task force and crashed into Victoria II.
Other than being the victim of a ridiculous intelligence failure from Headquarters, Chandrasekhar was lucky. The Free Virtue had split up upon reentry and the command section—which housed the bridge and communications equipment—had landed about 15 kilometers from the bulk of the ship. Chandrasekhar was the only survivor of the already decimated bridge crew after the crash. As procedure dictated, he made his way, on foot, to where the rest of the ship was, only to be captured by Imperial Navy sailors. Technically, it was sailor singular, as in, one muscular, dark skinned Ctarl-Ctarl woman who was shorter than him, but made up for it with long hair, a large chest and the ability to literally pick him up and throw him across the snowy plains of the polar region where he'd landed, with minimal effort.
"You will fight no more." That's what she told him, in her native tongue, after she'd thrown him into a snow drift about 20 meters away. She then marched him about 30 kilometers, rather briskly, to her own camp. That was his first exhausting day as a Ctarl-Ctarl prisoner-of-war.
He was surprised to be captured alive, until he found out what happened to the rest of the Free Virtue: the survivors had held up the wreck, fighting off the arriving Imperial patrol with whatever weapons they had on hand, surprisingly well, until the Ctarl-Ctarl unceremoniously, and maybe unintentionally, set off one of the ship's Munchausen Reactors, consuming the whole spot in a massive, probably radioactive fireball. The Ctarl-Ctarl were mildly discomforted; the Terrans were literally cooked to cinders. There were no other suvivors from the Free Virtue, and after the battle ended, Chandrasekhar was of some value.
He remembered the end of his first day in captivity, after that grueling march, vividly, despite having been almost a year ago.
"Chandrasekhar, Alan Shekhar. Lieutenant. United Space Forces Navy, Ninth Expeditionary Fleet. Executive Officer aboard the Free Virtue. Service code AA-Zero-Nine-Zero…"
"Okay, shut up, Alan," the Ctarl-Ctarl in charge, a midshipwoman in one of those rather ridiculous looking dark red formfitting bodysuit with off-white plastoid shoulder guards, collar ring and chest fittings, told him humorlessly. They all wore them; he understood that when a Ctarl-Ctarl could literally tear you to pieces if they were in a bad mood, it didn't matter how ridiculous their uniforms looked. They searched his possessions, rather than interrogating him, which he found a little odd. Indeed, the camp that served as his prison only had about had about two-dozen Ctarl-Ctarl present, and there presence was not immediately clear to him.
The next eleven months were disappointing, to say the least. After basically throwing him around when it was necessary to transport him, the Ctarl-Ctarl set up his "cell", which was an open spot on the edge of their camp: that is, their supply depot, barracks, armory and showers, all made of prefabricated buildings that had been assembled prior to his arrival. Upon the first day of this arrangement, he did the natural thing: he waited until the snowfall reached its thickest, hoarded whatever cloaks—the Ctarl-Ctarl wore ridiculous skintight clothes, but liked cloaks and scarves—and supplies he could obtain, and made his escape.
That was his first mistake. Marching through the snow, wearing the same clothes he'd been captured in, he was about to flee probably about eighteen kilometers to where he thought was a nearby settlement. He'd gambled, stupidly, that he could find a city with a spaceport and arrange some passage off world. He found neither, of course. His second mistake was thinking he could have reached a city even if there was one in the area: the next morning, when the snow relented, one of the Ctarl-Ctarl sailors, quite casually, went out on a morning run before breakfast, found him cold and exhausted in a snow bank, and literally dragged him back to camp, where he was thrown about a bit more and left to sit in his spot, after they took the cloaks and supplies he'd stolen. He didn't even know how they'd tracked him, certainly not by his footprints, which the fallen snow had erased. They might have smelled or even heard him. Eternally a pessimist, he did not try again.
'Alan' figured out what was expected of him: using tools supplied to him by his captors, he manage to build a very small but otherwise acceptable cabin from nearby fern trees that the Ctarl-Ctarl would literally yank out in order to cut into firewood. Once he had shelter, he was able to make some crude furniture out of refuse thrown out by the Ctarl-Ctarl: a ration drum—some of the Ctarl-Ctarl rations literally came in drums—served as a table while he was able to fix a folding chair into something that mostly worked. With that, he could take his meals inside, rather than sitting in the snow waiting for some sailor to realize it was time to the feed the captive and try and bean him in the head with a soup can. Soup was pretty much the one thing the sailors regularly had that he could easily eat, he was not in a position to eat the weird indigenous life they hunted or fished, cleaned, gutted and cook.
He did this for eleven months. Without any word or sign from the Space Forces, for whom he expected the war was going poorly, if the good spirits of his captors were any indication. The sailors, whom all looked younger than him, some of them having barely finished adolescence, were perpetually energetic, cheerful, and self-amused. The polar climate did not affect them in the least, nor did the very long days followed by very long and even more depressing nights.
Eventually, they started taking pity on him. While they refused to give any indication as to when he'd be freed—he assumed when the war was over and prisoners were finally exchanged—they decided to be sociable. It was perhaps ironic, just as Terrans looked at Ctarl-Ctarl as animals, so did his captors approach him as such. Their first step was to give him better food, and more of it, but require that leave his cabin to do so. They got the idea to teach him their language—naturally, like all officers he knew the basics, but he could hardly converse intelligently.
In the middle of that, one of them pointed out the obvious:
"You know, he looks like an animal. And smells worse."
Despite his 'resistance', a sailor literally picked him up, and dragged him to the shower—a prefabricated-building attached to a chemical washroom. To his surprise, there were actually two Ctarl-Ctarl women showering there already. Upon seeing them, his reaction was to immediately scramble for the door, only to have the same sailor grab him, strip him down, and throw him into a stall. They only released him after he had his first real bath in weeks, scrubbing himself down with a bar of soap. After that, one of those two women, still soapy, dragged him out, dropped him in front of a mirror, and with the expression of child playing with a doll, shaved him and cut his hair with a razor. The whole experience was horrifying—a nude Ctarl-Ctarl pressed against his back, shaving his beard with a razor as sharp as surgical scalpel and the size of a large combat knife, humming and whistling as she periodically checked her progress in the mirror. The Ctarl-Ctarl did not have a Terran appreciation of physical modesty, nor a Terran fear of sharp blades.
They washed his uniform blues and returned them to him and, all things considered, he actually felt as good as he had since his captivity began, or did once he finished shaking from nearly having his neck slit. Now that he was suitable-looking and his odor was inoffensive, the socialization began in earnest.
This was as much 'resistance' as he ever mounted. He was a graduate of the top naval school of the Tenpa Empire, a candidate for a doctorate. The Ctarl-Ctarl were not as stupid as domesticated cats, far from it, and they were much more intelligent than any stereotype would suggest, but of the two-dozen sailors mysteriously marooned on the planet, none of them had been educated past the Ctarl-Ctarl equivalent of tertiary school, and none had a university education. There was not a single commissioned officer among them, to his surprise. As a result, it was easy to resist their simple intellectual ploys and jibes at his frailty. He deliberately kept them at a distance, refusing to become too friendly, even though the Ctarl-Ctarl were a friendly bunch to say the least. In time, he learned why they, and by extension he, were still on Victoria II: their frigate had been crippled by in that faithful battle, and they had been deployed on the planet to ensure that any Terran survivors were collected. Despite having orbital guns, Victoria II was sparsely populated, except for a completely different continent than the one where he resided, and there was no spaceport without ten thousand kilometers. And so, here they all were, trying the make the best of a particularly boring assignment.
Chandrasekhar did not take it as well as they did.
It was the next year, around the month of February, where his daily routine of cool, cold disinterest was interrupted. He had a faithful conversation with the midshipwoman, the same NCO in charge, albeit now wearing her bodysuit unzipped to her waist, her brown hair grown out into a giant, long braid, and her large chest wrapped in surplus cloth like a sarashi. She informed him of something they'd kept from him for several months: another scuttled Space Forces ship, the carrier Augustus, was actually on an impact course just a few dozen kilometers away, and when it hit, it would probably explode with a force of as much as a hundred megatons, courtesy of its reactors and ordnance. So they were going to evacuate, and had to decide what to do with him.
He didn't know what upset him more: that this had been kept from him, or that they hadn't even considered returning him after the war had ended. Which it had!
Chandrasekhar faced a dilemma: he did not want to die after all this, but the notion of remaining in Ctarl-Ctarl custody for an indefinite period managed to be even worse. He was a Space Forces officer! It was better to die in honor than to live out his life as either a prisoner or a novelty on an enemy world. With all the solemnness he could manage, he calmly informed that he would not accompany her crew, no matter what, so they might as well let him flee on his own, against orders, or shoot him right now.
The midshipwoman was not impressed and expressed this by throwing the table at him. When his resolve became apparent, they did not use their usual method of simply picking him up and forcing him, but instead, left their camp once a shuttle arrived for them. And so it was his last day of captivity: the Ctarl-Ctarl sailors boarded, one of the sailors looking genuinely remorseful as he glowered at them from his cabin. She gave him a sad wave before stepping through the doors as the shuttle departed.
Chandrasekhar wasn't purely suicidal—he felt he had rationally considered his options. Unfortunately, he did not know where the Augustus would descend, though it didn't matter: whether it exploded just above the surface or impacted, the area of hundreds, if not thousands, of square kilometers would be devastated. There was no point in fleeing—his one chance was to join the Ctarl-Ctarl, and having rejected that, it was time to meet his maker. He moved into the prefabricated buildings left behind and helped himself to what was left of the canned soup and tea. He tried smoking a Ctarl-Ctarl cigarette, which turned out to be a bad idea to put it mildly, contemplated life and death, and waited to be consumed in a massive fireball.
His redemption came in an unexpected form: what looked like a meteorite impact that, upon inspection, was actually a small block from the carrier. Inside, in what was a fantastically lucky break, was a one-man recon ship. It took all of Chandrasekhar's resourcefulness and knowledge to get it in working order, and as the Augustus went from a twinkle to a bright streak in the night sky, he triumphantly departed, leaving a message written on the inside of the crashed block, which might survive the incoming blast if his crudely repaired ship did not.
Lieutenant Alan Shekhar Chandrasekhar, of the USFS Free Virtue of the 9th Expeditionary Fleet, United Space Forces, was here on Victoria II for 339 days. Escaped to space on a craft salvaged from the descending USFS Augustus. Preserve my memory for my beloved family, the Chandresekhars of Ji Ward, Eastern Capital, Tenpa Imperial Capital World.
He survived, narrowly, thanks to a Corbanite commercial salvage ship that picked him up once he was in orbit, and out of fuel, around Victoria II. It took three weeks, but he was eventually returned to what was left of the 9th Expeditionary Fleet, along the edges of Kei Guild Space. But even with the Treaty of Heifong and the end of the war, it was not his last encounter with the Ctarl-Ctarl, but the first of many of the next thirty years.