Ch1 Extraction [2.5] – Jacob Nobel


The defining quality of a Tragedy is Hubris. The tragic hero staggers towards a painful end that is, ultimately, self-inflicted. And it must be that, though he has struggled against forces beyond his control and ultimately defeated, he gains a measure of new wisdom.

The Tragedy of Earth fit the mold. It was arrogance, and indolence, and selfishness, that brought billions headlong towards a fate miserable and inevitable.

The pains and terrors of Planet, and the deaths of so many good men and women since Planetfall… to call their fate tragic would be an insult. The greatest fear of the Gaians is that those children born on Planet, living with an environment inimical to human life, would not realize the price of hubris. Born on a planet that was paradise, that was the Song of Earth, squandered and debased, that was a Dirge of Earth.

But Planet, hardly so kind, it is so easy to treat it as an adversary.

The Morgans believed it was their right to take from the world all its resources, giving no thought to the native life that wanted to kill them. Why not, eh? It was only fair to take spoils from the enemy, and the whole world was their foe. The Spartans bared their teeth at Planet, burning and asserting their dominance over it. To a lesser extent, all others saw the xenofungus and its ecology as hindrance for the rebirth of human civilization.

No other faction on Planet sought to meet Planet as a new friend. They valued little about what they despoiled, for human survival was paramount.

The Stepdaughters of Gaia, finest biologists and biotechnics on Planet, agonized over hubris and inevitability. For this, they were ridiculed as deluded dreamers, putting mindless alien lives over human ones.


I was born in London, in the middle of the Resource Wars. Almost every other day, there was a food riot. Worse than how the rich were living it up in their walled compounds, the spread of genetic engineering gave rise to eugenic programs that made "Perfects" of their children. While outwardly it would difficult to prove being a designer baby, many "Perfects" were beautiful, long-lived, and resistant to common illnesses that characterized the human condition. They were stronger, lived faster, and many of them wasted their bodies in hedonistic bliss. Others gravitated naturally to positions of authority.

I remember I was nine years old, and it was the first time I saw someone crucified. The riot gangs had managed to ambush and overpower a food convoy. Among them, they found people they decided were "Perfects", who were lording it over humans on unearned stolen wealth, and sated their rage and frustrations upon them.

It was a cold November morning. I saw her tied onto a lamp-post, her pale skin almost glowing in the streams of sunlight slicing between buildings. And, well, she was beautiful no more. But half her face was left unmarred. I wondered if that was all the reason they had for deciding she was a test tube baby. She was too beautiful. So she had to be mutilated, she had to scream for mercy, and then she had to die. No one had ever shown the poor and hungry of the New Commonwealth any mercy no matter how much they begged.

This is wrong; I decided then. It was all wrong! I would never become a monster just because I was hungry. I would never be violent over anyone, just because I was in pain.

One of the policemen arriving to take down the corpses cuffed me by the side of the head, sending me down the street. "Little pervert," he spat, as I writhed there clutching my head, my vision whiting out in pain.

People who are hungry are rarely rational. I wanted to travel the world, because I was sure there was still decency somewhere. I went into bio-engineering because food plants that grew faster, on less water, on poor soils… these, more than all the most sophisticated military hardware, these were the best options for peace. I met Lady Deirdre while working under the UN Disaster Relief Fund to develop plant strains that could survive in irradiated soils or contaminated by heavy metals.

When the Unity Mission was launched, all of us felt that the billions on Earth were living on borrowed time. As the lid closed on my coldsleep pod, I could only pray that the inevitable apocalypse would not happen in my mother and little sister's lifetime. Ruth, my sister, punched me in the face when I said I might decide not to take that ticket and stay behind with them instead. To protect them.

Someone in the family getting away from this bloody nonsense, now that would really make them happy; I was told that. I was all but thrown out. I was their only hope for the future. My duty was not to the world, but for all those yet unborn.

It has been twenty-four years since Planetfall.

My little sister should be, what, 76 now? I wondered if she had married. My mother was getting weak with lung disease when I left… she only had from four to seven years to leave. Well, at least, I hoped they continued the family line. Certainly I wasn't contributing to it here. Neither team played well with me. Unlike the Hive or even the Peacekeepers, we had no population pressure towards a more productive workforce or consumer base.

"Captain, share a fag?" I heard someone speak up from behind me.

I turned around to see Jennefer Vickery, my second-in-command. I looked to the lit cigarette in my hands. I held it out to her. "This is all I'm going for these days, sadly."

She snorted and accepted the cigarette. Four months before, she was a pure as you could be, she'd blush at hearing a bad word. The sea life cured much of that. Can't be a sailor without an expansive vocabulary. And even old unhealthy habits such as smoking were tolerated to help toughen the sinuses for an inevitable whiff of Planet's poisonous atmosphere.

At twenty-two, she was one of the newborns to Planet. She had a rounded face that seemed even more pixielike with her bowlcut hair. She was a Perfect, or at least descended from one. Better immune system, better sense of equilibrium, but nothing really perceptible. There was less stigma in Gaian society than elsewhere, while I'd heard rumors that Zakharov's University were pursuing unethical genetic research to renew the genemod projects. (I really did not expect any better from them.)

Her eyes were dark with tears and stress. And yet, there was still that earnestness in them that drew so many to her like moths to a flame. She was such a positive existence that you couldn't help but to bully her a little. If only then you could pat her head and say "I didn't mean it. It's okay…" when her eyes began to tear up.

"How about a hug?" I asked.

Her mouth turned down, her eyes welled up in tears, and with the cigarette still hanging off the edge of her lips she shoved herself into my arms. I patted her head and made soothing noises.

"I-it's not fair!" she wailed. "Warmongers get everything they want… and we just die."

She lost her brother (the captain of the Dawn Rising) just yesterday. Only reason I survived was that I was knocked out in the initial salvo, and when she had to take command, instead of fighting back she said over the radio that we were surrendering and had everyone rush to the lifeboats.

The Spartans shot the bridge of the Rosinbloom full of holes less than thirty seconds from her last transmission.

"It isn't…" I whispered. I felt my heart choke up in rage. "But that's why we have to be better than them."

It would have been unreasonable of me not to be hungry for vengeance against the Spartans. However, as I had explained to the crew earlier once we could finally sit and try to deal with our tragedy… it was not unthinkable that the Spartans may simply have not believed our transmissions that we were a neutral Gaian convoy.

For all that Santiago's boys thought us Gaians weak and too pathetic to even pity, they recognized that we were useful when it comes to biotechnology, medical sciences, and terraforming.

I could only come to one conclusion: We were betrayed.

We were just pawns in the political game. Both Spartans and Morgans – they were murderous lunatics, and we were sunk to advance their agendas.

After a while, Jenny pulled out of the hug. "Feeling a bit better?" I asked.

She nodded. She looked behind me, to the surviving crew sleeping in their bedrolls; or at least pretending to sleep as not to disturb our emotional moment. She turned back to me, and said in a barely-perceptible whisper "I'm not sure we're safe here, sir."

I sighed. I wanted to scold her for being too distrustful of our savior, but I couldn't exactly say she was wrong. "Why do you think so?" I asked instead.

"This place… it's a cargo ship, isn't it? But it's too big."

I was quite certain not even Earth ever built anything that floats to this scale. Though I did remember the need to pass through the Panama and Suez Canals still influenced ship design. They widened those canals, but even in the 2050s no ship would be built with the Matilda's beam.

Our savior… the mysterious commander Nemo… was nowhere to be found. Where he slept, who knew? The ship was certainly cavernous enough.

I watched the reflection of the two moons, Pholus and Nessus, upon wine-dark seas. And I said "Does it matter? Where it comes from? Neither the Morgans or the Spartans would help out of the goodness of their hearts, but I have a strong feeling Nemo has little love for either."

"It feels wrong," Jenny replied. "The size of this ship… look at these controls!" There were monitors and buttons – but more tellingly, unpainted blank metal everywhere. No writing anywhere, saying which did what. But there was more. "Haven't you noticed? The edges… the corners of the walls… it's too perfect. There isn't a sign of a seam or welding anywhere. Even the metal… it's much too smooth."

"It's just Synthmetal." I replied evenly. "It's nothing special."

"I don't think even the Morganites could produce this much Synthmetal in year!"

I scratched at the edge of my mustache with my thumb. "… speculating where this ship came from is an exercise in futility. At least, can we not be relieved that we may have gained a powerful ally?"

"For what purpose, captain? After what happened… how can you trust that someone's being charitable?!"

There was a difference between an official stance of pacifism, and thinking that Gaians don't fight. I recalled how Commander Nemo said that if we were to try and overpower him, we might succeed. That probably wasn't a lie. And yet, just as pointless.

"Strange, isn't it? We feel that our lives are under some stranger's hands…" I reminded her of it. "But at the same time, isn't he trusting his own life to our goodwill?"

"If that's so, then why isn't he sleeping here on the bridge?"

The bridge that was arguably the most important and here the most livable part of the ship. Jennefer puckered her lips and frowned. It seemed she was starting to realize how awkward that may be. We wouldn't be able to converse like this, if we had our benefactor potentially looking over our shoulder. The crew wouldn't be able to relax from their ordeal.

"How can you trust he's not spying on us right now?"

"Really now, Jen? A voyeur now?" I gave her a wry grin. "What has he done to make you think so badly of him?"

She blushed in embarrassment. We knew what Nemo looked outside of his helmet. He was still fairly young, with curly brown hair and gray eyes. His suit was, well… just this bit short of skin-tight.

She clenched her fists. Commander Nemo's pleasingly symmetrical face, his self-assured manner, his easy grin, and the cold intelligence behind his eyes, all of these added up to an unpleasant picture.

He was a genetically-modified human. A "Perfect".

Idly I was reminded, it is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time... that we never really figured out just who or what faction sabotaged the Unity and murdered Captain Garland.


Commander Nemo's payment for being a Good Samaritan was to be thrown forcefully against a console and a gun held to the back of his head. This happened... this is our fault. Yet... no one moved to help. Was I that much of a coward in the end? I looked at my crew, and we all shared shame and impotent anger. This was wrong. And yet, once more, I had no power to change the injustice before me.

He was still grinning. Blood dripped down his nostrils, but he only seemed all the more terribly amused.

He gave out a yelp of pain as the MSF officer bent his arm back to slap cuffs on them.

"Say, offisah. Are you a fan of the classics?" Nemo asked. The MSF goon's only reply was to grab the commander's hair at the back of his head, then to slam his face into the console again. The console screen cracked.

"My nemsh Nemo. You are? What's yer rank anyway? Sarge? Pay's good?"

Wham. The back of a metal-plated fist rammed into Nemo's cheek.

"Shut up." The MSF officer pulled Nemo's other hand back and cuffed his wrists together.

Commander Nemo turned his head and spat out a glob of blood and plehgm. "Wh- one must be kerful of the eheg-… haack, ptui – rippling effects of one's decisions in life. Something so easy, not worth thinking about, may mean so many regrets down the line. So we must be prepared to... be responsible... for lives other than our own."

"Morgans! Enough! We surrender!" I said to keep Nemo from suicide via terminal inability to keep his stupid gob shut.

"Really
, what do you think are the chances..."

"Shut it, or I'll shoot." was the response. I sucked in my breath and glanced aside. Jennefer already had her eyes shut.

"… that someone named Nemo is doing without a submarine?"

The Morgan Security Force officer paused. There was the merest tilt of the head to hint that he was receiving a radio message. After a few more moments, he held up his palm as a hand signal to his men to wait. Their fingers moved out of the trigger rings.

Commander Nemo was laughing. It was the laughter of a madman and a bully, and yet I couldn't help but to twitch a smile in turn.

"Or eight." Nemo whispered savagely through blood-soaked teeth.

####


MEMSTOR from DATALINKS keyword "Planet Ecology"

- n received:

In the past 30 years, we have used our telescopes to gather a few terabytes of information about the target world. On this basis we glibly call Chiron "earthlike." I want you to consider for a moment what that means. Chiron has gravity not too much higher than we find comfortable, an atmosphere containing water and free oxygen, a surface climate that we can tolerate. That's all. Billions of years of separate evolution have inevitably made Chiron a greater challenge than we can imagine. Even a familiar will be alien.
- Captain John Garland, initial address to the Unity crew, 2058.

Though officially named Chiron, with the moons Nessus and Pholus, most people refer to their home merely as Planet. Its geochemistry contains relatively little carbon and oxygen, but plenty of nitrogen and nitrogen compounds, which forces native plant life to minimize the use of carbon compounds. Planet's atmosphere was anoxic, poisonous to all earth animals, though its nitrogen-rich soils are a heaven for plant life. Native plants also photosynthesize, but fix energy in the form of organic nitrogen compounds.

As such, much of Planet's native plants are inedible, or even poisonous to human beings, no matter how succulent they may look. Among the exotic fruit trees discovered by explorers is the so-called "grenade fruit", which grows seed pods packed with low-grade explosives. Studying Centauri Ecology provided colonies with the tools they needed to begin shaping the world around them and integrate edible Terran plants into the environment where they can thrive.

Though there are many different species of plant life, the dominant form is the crimson, fantastically-shaped xenofungus (or fungus), which covers vast tracts of the surface. Its near cousin, sea fungus, is equally ubiquitous in Planet's oceans and seas. These fungal structures are not quite plants, not quite animals, and form tangled mats of hard tobules (or tall kelp-like stalks, in the case of sea fungus) that present significant obstacles to movement.

Like sea coral, fungal growths are central to the symbiotic web of native plant life. While exploring or clearing xenofungus, one might trigger an attack of Planet's most feared life form - the Mind Worm.