For those with keen eyes and sharp memories, you’ll recognize some names in this piece from a previous flash fic, titled Theme Thursday: Worship. This is an expanded version of that story from Natian’s point of view. One day I hope to expand this story into a novel, but until then, please enjoy this snippet.
The document stared back at Natian. The blank space above the signature line waited for him, right below the name that had no right to haunt him as it did.
“Commander?” The young man’s voice cut the silence, and Natian shook himself to the present. In the doorway an Alliance midshipman stood, folio half-open in expectancy.
“Oh! Right.” Natian looked back down at the document. This time he would sign it, he really would. Now that it was in front of him, his resolve evaporated. But it had to be him.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Aidanson, sir. Zalias Aidanson.” An Earth Migrant like himself. With a name like that it was hard to mistake him for anything else. The Earthers had a habit of naming their children after their ‘heroes’, even if that heroism was short-lived.
Former Range Admiral Zalias Walsh fell from grace in a spectacular display of poor judgment and underestimation of the Pact… including Natian himself. His administration ended with Walsh drunkenly firing a mint condition Earth American made Colt .45 through the glass of his bath suite, aiming wildly and swearing ’til he hit the floor with Natian’s bullet between his eyes.
Walsh had been his hero at one time, but that was long ago. The Hero of the Alliance had not been elected to govern. He knew nothing of policy or appeasement. He understood strongmen and naked force, nothing else. Disgraced Governor Zalias Walsh died fighting as both.
Natian wondered if he would be seen that way someday. Would someone else be staring down at a death warrant like he was now, thinking the same things? How many leaders would fall by his hand in the name of the Alliance?
Lyns had always told him that the history of humankind was filled with revolutionaries. She called it a chorus of silk slippers descending and wooden shoes climbing. Natian’s shoes must have looked comfortable to a civilian by now, just like Zalias Walsh’s before him.
It was a thought that lurked too often of late. He shook his head, forcing himself to focus. He turned back to the officer.
“Zalias is a rare name to own up to these days. How old are you?”
The midshipman nodded with a nervous smile. “Eighteen, sir.”
His own son was eight, named in the same Earther fashion as the unfortunate officer before him. Ten more years and he might be standing in that same doorway as Aidanson, waiting for some inconsequential document to be signed. Only this one wouldn’t be inconsequential to his son. Not ever.
Natian swirled his glass, letting the melted ice blend into the amber liquid. It was all procrastination.
“Midshipman. No need to wait in the doorway. I’ll be handling this personally. You’re dismissed.”
The younger man gave a slight bow, backing out of the pod with more deference than strictly necessary. Even after eight years Natian still couldn’t adjust to the near-worship officers treated him with. Being the Natian Shipstrong had its perks, though. He couldn’t think of any off the top of his head, not while staring down a death warrant, but he was sure there were some. In other times.
For his actions during the Pact Coup, Natian Shipstrong inspired a generation of sons named for him, including his own. If his parents were still alive they would have been horrified– their son, a symbol of their desire to abandon the establishment, now the ultimate symbol of an ever-expanding regime.
It felt like an age since then, not eight years. He’d never met his son, just as Lyns preferred. She kept the boy from the public eye, insulated by Earther tutors and Venusian minders. Her radical cronies began laying the seeds for succession early. The child of the Migrant’s cause, the issue of heroes. Who could be more sympathetic to the future of biologically ‘pure’ Earthers?
By the time the child was of age, no doubt she’d be pushing for his ‘inheritance’. Natian didn’t know his son, but he’d be damned if the race he fought to protect was handed to a brat raised by terrorists.
Unless he signed the order.
The holodoc chirped, still waiting for his signature. A notification showed at the top of the slip, just a single line blinking the message.
The Alliance needs a response.
He blinked, eyes dry. He couldn’t deny his reluctance as he once again stared at the empty signature line. At one time he thought things would be different. That was before the radicals and their charming regent Orion Myles.
Unbidden, the man’s face appeared on his implant screen, scrolling an endless ticker tape of redacted classified information next to the blinking ‘INTER-SYS TERRORIST’. If he wanted, Natian could access it with his rank and code. He flicked the image away. The general’s personal feelings and masochistic curiosity had been buried long ago.
His fingers slid over the holodoc, pressing his thumb next to the waiting signature field. His name followed, and another press of his thumb to certify. A new message flickered at the header of the document.
0500. Gaspra Unit, Sgt Pallas. RDV at Command.
Natian glanced at the time. He downed the rest of his glass and rocked in his chair, teetering on the two back legs. The lock clicked in place, keeping the chair balanced as he sank into the plush cushions.
“Spectra, wake me in four hours.” The pod lights lowered and gave an acknowledgment chirp. A low-grade sleeping additive filtered through pressurized vents in a heavy wave of lavender. He closed his eyes.
_______
They were on the Insatiable— the commandeered Alliance ship with all the new tech the Pact couldn’t afford. It was a flagship of the uprising and a symbol of the establishment’s failure.
Natian had never seen Lyns more beautiful. Her eyes sparkled with excitement behind the plasma-proof helmet. Her armor plated her body like a second, droid-like skin; he savored the way she took deep, heaving breaths and knew exactly what that looked like under all that armor– soft, pliable flesh that responded to his own. Her Pact tattoos peeked out at the neck, geometric lines and shapes reaching up her scalp. They told of a proud, fearless patriot. Their friends treated her like a hero, dauntless and pure. But Lyns Runia was so much more.
He wanted to pry off each plate of AlloySafe one by one right there in the airlock, let the rest of the Pact leadership see who the indomitable Lyns Runia got on her knees for. Only they knew what this life cost them, and the price they still had to pay for their actions. There wasn’t a bounty out on the crew’s head. Only Lyns and Natian’s. More than anything or anyone, they needed each other.
She hefted her Astra Peacemaker. “Ready?” Those nebular green pools of hers were all determination.
He nodded and raised his twin print. She’d printed them both, their Securicodes etched in the grips, modded to glow a faint ultraviolet in the right hands. “Let’s make history.”
They approached the cargo bay with pride swelling through the ranks, armbands rippling among rows of stoic faces.
Above the dock bay doors a scrolling banner read: ‘Just once more, unto the breach.’ Lyns loved her folksy Earth phrases. Her followers loved them, maybe even more. Ancient passages from Earth whipped up a zeal for pride in their heritage, in the beings that reached the heavens in their unrelenting will to survive.
She invoked that love now, raising her Peacemaker at the head of the march. The words thundered in Natian’s ears as they advanced in lockstep. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”
The cheering started, drowning out half of her words, but her eyes were alight with adrenaline and passion. Their faces flushed, hands linked, he could feel his pulse in his fingertips. Or maybe it was her’s.
“But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage….”
He wanted to kiss her but squeezed her hand instead. She threw him a quick smile and went to the bay controls, whirling back to the crew.
“For the Pact! For the Migrants! For the Outer Rocks!” The chant went up as she slammed her hand down on the panel.
The doors swung open, planetside fresh air rushing in as the liftgate lowered. The five peaks of the Alliance embassy rose in the east with the Twin Suns, gleaming in the young light of day.
By nightfall, the sirens filled the compound, and the flames could have reached the heavens…
Natian jolted awake as the alarm built around him, pulling him away from images of the firelit Embassy.
With a drowsy wispy grasp he clung to memories he hadn’t lived for nearly a decade. He hadn’t dreamed of her, or the Pact Coup, in a long time. It’d been so real, down to how she smelled, and her warmth as they marched shoulder to shoulder. Her zeal was just as intoxicating now as it was then.
More than anything he wished he could live in that moment, remember something more beautiful today than what was to come. Bring it back. I want it back.
The night the Alliance capitulated to the Pact they made love like never before. Breathing clean planetside air, they felt more alive than in seven years of risking death to get there. The exhilaration of victory flowed through them– they couldn’t sleep if they tried.
In celebration, the emergency sirens were activated and blared down every corridor. The possession of the Embassy felt so unreal. They made a bonfire on the steps and drank spirits from Earther crystal, marveling at the decadence.
It wasn’t until the small hours of the morning that the fatigues of battle felt like millstones. They claimed the Governor’s Suite as their own and one by one, set each piece of AlloySafe aside, every stitch of clothing came off.
After clearing away only the largest of the broken glass from Walsh’s last stand, they bathed each other in silence. Lavender and sweat mingled in the steam of the shower, sloughing off with sudsy worshipful strokes. She washed his feet like her folk heroes on Earth, and they both took off their contraception bands.
“It was the way God meant us to be,” she’d told him.
Natian had never believed in God, but if he’d ever felt the presence of Him it was then. The Embassy may as well have been a cathedral.
Lyns’s fervor for dusty old doctrines became something of a curiosity after her pregnancy became public. It was a rare choice for any person to choose to conceive, let alone carry a child. Deep in the tenuous balance of coup success, while he turned to infrastructure, Lyns turned to Orion Myles and his brand of religious extremism. Natian never saw the baby boy he’d given part of himself to create. Perhaps it was better that way.
It wasn’t until the formal transfer of power that Natian realized Lyns wanted nothing to do with the business of running a country. She left the bureaucracy to him and their fellow Pact leaders, taking command of the fleet instead. She never felt comfortable planet-side.
Unmoored and alone, Natian was thrown into a new kind of leadership. Martial Governance, he discovered, required different skills, and created more difficult challenges than merely whipping up enough fervor for the masses to arm themselves. He assimilated into the vacuum of Alliance government and his revolutionary ideals with him for the greater good.
For a time Lyns was useful to unite the Outer Rock factions in the belt– she served as a figurehead in the new administration that represented the values of the Pact Migrants.
The death warrant Natian signed would see the end of all that. Lyns’s anti-Alliance religious extremism would threaten humanity’s interstellar viability if she were allowed to continue.
Despite backwater planet origins, Natian was not a superstitious man. Still, he couldn’t shake the cold feeling that clung to him as he readied for duty. Even in the steam of his shower he could not scrub off the sense of wrongness for what he was about to do. To dream of Lyns, to remember how it felt, to be back in those moments with her again on the eve of executing her.
A bad omen, she’d say. “Omens are the language of God,” she’d say. But Natian had come to hate religion.
Fuck the omens.
____________________________________
Lyns hid her wealth well, in a place many astral belt miners would consider close enough to the heavens for it to be the heavens.
The pod they arrived at was at height with the limits of the planet’s atmosphere, with a view that few Migrant activists would ever be so fortunate to see. The weak light of the Twins left a faint blue cast over the thick walls of atmosglass as dusky mists rose from below. No real Migrant activist would ever see luxury such as that in their working-class conditions. Mine shafts didn’t have glass, or fine tiles, or a view of the Twins.
Red clay from Martian quarries tiled the floor in the Pact insignia, blooming on the pod landing with the richest of the planet’s bounty. Flooring made of Martian clay resisted heat– next to the door lay a pair of men’s lined silk slippers.
Perhaps the next revolutionary will learn from their mistakes.
“Pod is clear,” the officer reported, saluting Natian from the portwell.
He nodded, strapping on a duty belt. “Myles? And the boy?”
“Both not present, sir.”
A relief. As badly as he wanted to put a bullet between Orion Myles’s eyes, Lyns was the primary.
“Get Command to send a team to find them. Does she know we’re here?”
“Imaging indicated a heat signature in the main room, core temp and heart rate elevated. In possession of a Peacemaker.”
Natian chuckled. Some things never changed. Her home print Astra Peacemaker was always her favorite sidearm of choice, since the very beginning. Even after the weapons manufacturer Astra named one of their print kits after her, she would never retire what had given her the first taste of power.
Natian unholstered. Even with access to any Alliance weapon he’d ever want, it was only right that he used his own print, from all those years ago. It glowed softly in his hands.
He turned to Sergeant Pallas. “Okay.”
Lavender flooded his nostrils as the door swung open and his heart sank. Of course it was lavender. She wouldn’t make it easy for him.
They’d spent seven years working as one to bend the Alliance to their will. No amount of authorized death warrants could make him feel right about her waiting there, knowing what was to come.
Once more, unto the breach. The commander steeled himself, raised his print, and followed the officer.
She stood watching the Twins rise, a cardigan wrapped tightly around her and a glass in one hand. Her hair usually in a tight bun, was instead mussed to the side. She didn’t look like a revolutionary. She’d probably been waiting there all night.
“Natian.”
He didn’t love her. Not anymore. Didn’t hate her, either. Revolutions were complicated things, and the last thing he wanted was another on his hands. It had to be done. He grimaced, tightening his grip on the print.
“Range Commander Lyns Runia. I have a warrant for your execution.”
Her voice was cold. Cold and quiet. The atmosglass reflected her face, the dim sunsrise illuminating her eyes.
“I’m glad it’s you, Natian.” A shadow on her right side twitched. A pin of ultraviolet flashed.
Natian squeezed the trigger. At the sound of the shot she jerked, releasing the Peacemaker to clatter to the clay tile. In an agonizing turn she faced him, the soft shhhing of slippers against the floor. Emerald eyes shone out from dark circles, staring back in rebuke to Natian.
He fired again. A dark wet stain bloomed at her chest. It blotted out her Pact tattoos, coating her cardigan and hands. She sank against the curved glass, crimson smearing down the window in her wake. The rising Twins shone through the smears with an innocent pink tint.
“I’m glad, too.”
Natian chose to let the ringing in his ears drown out the silence. It was better than the wet gurgle of her last breaths.
___________________________________
I was born to leadership. It was in my blood.
Out of the seven men who shared the same name on the Alliance Coalition, only one had the right to be called Natian and he was my father. To my squadmates and even to the minders who raised me I was called Runia, another child in a long list of names from former revolutionaries and terrorists alike.
At a young age I was thrust into a system that was rife with the orphans of “persons of history”, as we were called. We underwent ‘re-education’, and came out the most fiercest defenders of the Alliance.
For a time I think I even forgot my own first name, like it was a classification and not the name my mother gave me. Just another orphan named for the hero of the Pact, just another cadet in the military complex that didn’t care what my name was. No one knew that the man who led the Alliance had a part in making me– who would believe that, anyway?
Though I’d served under Natian in the Unrest, I never met him. He issued orders, I followed them. I doubt he even knew my first name. By the time I wore a medal of office Natian Shipstrong was another disgraced bureaucrat, inconsequential and forgotten, albeit having longer tenure than most. It wasn’t until I assumed command of my own boat that an archivist bothered to tell me I was his son. It would’ve been a relief to know he was my father, instead of Orion Myles.
“Do you remember the Unrest skirmishes of ‘38?” I rocked forward in my chair, my one government-sanctioned luxury in Astran leather. Hard to get in outer ring planets, but no one could say I hadn’t earned it, least of all the prisoner across from me.
The older man’s eyes drifted to the ceiling beams. I wondered if he recognized his old office, even if the paint color had changed. His slow nod and fleeting grimace in the silence said he remembered it all.
He’d worn that same expression on the steps of the Alliance embassy after the Outer Rocks negotiations in ‘38 turned to riots. I’d memorized every line of his face as the rebels fell over themselves to surrender to him.
No one would recognize him anymore, the homeless drunk the investigators found in the streets of New Alliance.
“I worshiped you, you know that?”
His chuckle was just as I remembered. “You sure did. Near pissed yourself just to be in the same squad.”
As a cadet of eighteen Natian Shipstrong had been everything to me. It was every child’s dream to serve with a patriot, a decorated war hero, especially their namesake.
In my heart there was still a part of me that worshipped him, though he had little resemblance to the man I’d served under. I’d never been one for religion, or whatever it was my mother and her cohorts believed. Maybe I was too far removed, being raised planetside after her death.The Embassy was my church. Ambition was my form of piety, and Natian was my patron saint.
“Your mother would be proud of you, son. You accomplished things she never could.” Son. As if he knew anything about fatherhood.
I traced the lines of the print on the desk. It was a find I’d taken the liberty of claiming from the extensive property lockers the Alliance kept on all “persons of history”. I didn’t have to check the code under the grip. Before I’d even located it in the catalog I knew exactly whose it was.
“You don’t get to talk about my mother, Natian.”
“Lyns Runia was a formidable leader.” He grimaced again, shifting the restraints that bit into his wrists. “Hard to serve with at times. Helluva woman.”
“Don’t.” The word caught in my throat.
“Never let anyone call her ‘sir’. With us in the Rocks Annex, took the Alliance’s mortars just like us. I loved her. We all did.”
The archive device flickered as I slid it to the middle of the desk. The holodoc floated in bright plasma between us. His authorization code glowed underneath the orders, dated for twenty years ago to the day. He stared through it back to me, wordless.
The print had never felt heavier as I picked it up with a clammy palm.
“I was eight years old.” I’d never known my father. Never knew I’d served him like a simpering puppy, in blind adoration of the man responsible for taking my mother from me.
He shook his head and met my gaze. “The time for violence passed. The new leadership wanted peace. Runia didn’t, she never had. It was the right thing to do. Was only right I was the one to do it.”
Natian sat unmoving as my hands trembled, my mother’s print leveled, finger curled over the trigger. He could at least have the decency to show remorse, but those blue eyes never wavered.
Hot moisture clouded my vision. “Was it like this? Or did you shoot her in the back?”
“Son.” So quiet I almost didn’t hear. No. It was too late for that. He had no right.
“I worshiped you.” I squeezed the trigger. The shot thundered through the study, sending my ears ringing.
His expression didn’t change, only stiffened as the bullet entered his body and blood seeped down his chest. To veterans like Natian and I, the familiar bee sting feeling of a bullet passing through the body was unsurprising at best. He met my eyes.
I fired again, and this time he slowly slumped as crimson fountained from his temple.
I never knew my father. But I knew I was born to greatness.