Speaking of Homework...
Feb. 1st, 2005 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chibi_trillian...this is what happens when I overachieve for a creative writing class. My professor wanted 200 words. I gave him 2200. It's sci-fi (oooh!) with, as Ashe-chan calls them, "buggy aliens." I think they look more like butterflies, myself.
This is a story about a whale...no! This is a story about being happy! It's the happy happy joy joy story!
*smacks self*
Actually, this is a story about finding a new home, and what happens when someone doesn't want to stop roaming.
He had found it.
The image of the planet on the viewscreen made V’han’s delicately feathered antennae quiver with joy. The oceans on this unnamed planet shone like sapphires with reflected sunlight. The hazy bubble of the atmosphere seemed to glow as it rounded the curve of the globe to disappear beyond the terminator and slip into quiet night. He could see continents and large islands glittering with emerald-green vegetation and the silvery threads of rivers on the screen’s magnification of the world.
His long silver talons stroked the smooth orb of the sensor panel, and brought up a smaller screen to display the scan data on the planet. He had to bite back an ululation of happiness—it was perfect, perfect beyond belief. No intelligent life, but abundant flora and fauna. The atmosphere was well within the tolerance levels for his kind, the gravity was the same. This star’s rays, unlike the sun on his former home, brought life, not painful death from lashing solar flares and the silent poison of radiation. And this entire solar system was completely unclaimed.
At last, at long last, his people had found a new home. It took all his concentration to tear his multi-faceted violet eyes from the front screen to enter in the long-unused code for orbital entry to the helm panel. The mighty ship, shaped like a quicksilver teardrop with blue-glowing engine ports in the rounded stern, groaned, decelerating slowly into orbit so that it would not jar its precious cargo—over 20,000 cryogenically frozen people. The miniscule crew that actually ran this massive hulk had been the only ones awake for this whole cruise. They’d had to deal with food shortages, unfriendly ships, spatial dangers like uncharted black holes, and the loneliness and creeping hopelessness of their seemingly impossible quest.
Their quest was over, now. They had found the unfindable—an unclaimed life-supporting world. They’d had to roam far, far away from the established spacelanes, but they had found it.
V’han couldn’t help it—he leapt up from the helm panel and did a spinning jump of joy, indigo and purple wings flaring in the dull, recycled air of the control center. Color-scales filled the air as they were brushed loose from the delicate, veined membranes by his sudden exertion, sparkling like pixie dust as they drifted on the air, settling on the slick metal of the instrument panels, swirling between the delicate floating spheres of the ship’s guidance systems, shimmering as they were caught in the light from the holoprojectors for the viewscreen, dusting his soft pale grey skin with the magic of his happiness.
He had to tell the others.
He called Kil’ree and M’fel immediately to tell them that at long last their travels were over. Kil’ree’s shimmering song of jubilation rang through the intercom as she danced before the gleaming crystalline matrix of their engines. He could hear her toe-claws ringing on the metal grating of the deck through the speakers. The mighty engines she had kept running all through these years and these trials would soon be converted to planetary power sources.
M’fel’s reaction was more subdued, but he seemed happy as well, his softly hissing voice echoing faintly in the great vault of the cryogenics monitoring room. M’fel was like that—he never got too loud. Even at the year-dances back home, M’fel had been quiet and sober. But V’han could almost hear M’fel’s antennae puffing with elation in that way that they did when he was especially pleased but didn’t want to show it.
V’han was not looking forward to telling Z’lun. He thought that the long trip had warped Z’lun a bit. He would make these jokes about ejecting the cryo-tubes and saving themselves the power they needed to maintain them—except they didn’t sound like jokes, not until (a second too late) he would flare his scarlet and gold wings and curl his antennae and laugh his tinny laugh that always made M’fel grind his mandibles audibly. Kil’ree said it was the isolation, that Z’lun would be fine when they found their new planet and could feel healthy sunlight on his wings, taste the freshness of vegetables not grown in a hydroponics bay, smell the flower-laden breeze playing with his antennae, talk to more than just three others.
V’han and M’fel agreed that Kil’ree was just being kind. Z’lun had always given him the creeps, and probably always would. They had no choice but to put up with him, though. No one else knew spaceborne weaponry and tactics like Z’lun did.
Still, Z’lun had to be told. Surprising him during landing would not be a good idea. Reluctantly, V’han dialed in the code for the weaponry room.
Z’lun’s responding voice scraped out of the tiny speakers and into his eardrums like someone rasping a serrated blade across the most sensitive tips of his antennae. V’han involuntarily closed his eyes, shuddering. Z’lun was in rare form today.
“We have found our new home, Z’lun. It’s perfect. We’ll be making atmospheric entry within a planetary rotation. M’fel’s already started thawing out the first group.”
There. He’d said it. Now he could shut off the ‘com and hope Z’lun left him alone until they made planetfall.
Z’lun’s voice stopped his hand as he reached to touch the ruby marble that deactivated the intercom. “You’re giving up? Just like that?”
“What’s this ‘giving up’ of which you speak, Z’lun? We’re done. We can stop roaming now. No more scraping for food, no more trying to evade K’inti patrol ships, no more quiet! We. Are. Home.” This was getting weird, even for a conversation with Z’lun. The misbegotten mammal-spawn could at least have the courtesy to keep his heretical opinions to himself when everyone else obviously didn’t share them.
“You’re rejecting the stars. You’re giving up freedom for what we were ordered to do years ago by men and women too old and too sun-addled to do their own work. You’re a slave, V’han, nothing more. You’ll get a pat on the head from our governors, a comfortable pension for the rest of your life, maybe a few statues in your honor. ‘Our hero,’ they will call you, those who were too cowardly to make their own voyage. In exchange, you will willingly sever your wings so that you will spend the rest of your life grounded, looking up at what was once within claw’s-grasp and wondering if you should have decided differently,” Z’lun spat, mandibles clicking audibly with each enraged utterance. V’han could hear his claws squeaking on something glass as he clenched them.
“Z’lun, you’re crazy.”
“You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you V’han? You and M’fel. Kil’ree listens to me at least, but she thinks I’ll change my mind once we make planetfall. She’s wrong. You’re all wrong. But I’ll show you.” The icy hand of fear clenched V’han’s spiracles, stopping his breath. He quietly tapped the code to make this a four-way conversation. Maybe M’fel could do something. M’fel was trained to preserve life, but in this case he might have to take it to save their lives and the lives of their entire race. He prayed they’d both have the sense to stay silent when the ‘com line opened up.
“What are you going to do, Z’lun?” His voice sounded distressingly squeaky in his own eardrums, but the question needed to be asked. Their weapons officer was completely insane and in control of enough firepower to devastate the planet below them, gleaming like a gemstone on the black background of space but infinitely more precious.
He could hear Z’lun’s wings snapping out in an aggression-display. “I’m going to drop a planetcracker bomb on the planet below, since you so kindly put us in close equatorial orbit.”
“We don’t have planetcracker weaponry, Z’lun,” V’han said, antennae curling close to his head in shock.
Z’lun laughed that awful, acidic laugh of his. “We do now. I’ve had a lot of time with very little to do, V’han, since you were so disobliging as to avoid combat with other ships. You denied me the prizes of conquest I so richly deserved, so I think I’ll kill you, as an example to the other two. I need Kil’ree, but I’m willing to bet I can learn either your job or M’fel’s.”
V’han felt his knee joints locking with a combination of terror and rage. “You can’t kill me, Z’lun. The helm controls took me ten sun-rounds to learn while I had the best teachers our world could offer. How can you learn them by yourself in a few planetary rotations? Besides, the helm controls are coded to me, and I’m not planning on giving you access.” He tried to sound calm and reasonable. He prayed he did. He prayed that Z’lun wasn’t so insane that he’d ignore logic. He prayed that M’fel was listening and coming to the same conclusion that V’han had.
Z’lun had to die.
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, broken only by the sound of Z’lun’s claws clicking on panels and control spheres. Probably verifying V’han’s claims. V’han heard faint cursing, then a bitter-sounding, “Fine. M’fel will die, then. We won’t need him once I eject the cryo-tubes.”
V’han stopped breathing for the second time in the conversation. Their entire race, wiped out at the whim of a madman. If M’fel hadn’t been ready to kill him before, he would be now. It was just a matter of time. M’fel was twice Z’lun’s size—if he took him by surprise, he could kill or seriously injure him with ease. For now, he needed to keep Z’lun distracted. “You’ll need him if you ever get hurt, Z’lun. He’s the only one who can perform surgery on this ship. And how are you planning on perpetuating our species if you eject the cryo-tubes? Surely you’re not so mad as to want the extinction of our entire people.”
“That’s what I need Kil’ree for. We have the frozen genetic material stockpile; all I have to do is give Kil’ree fertility-enhancing drugs, wait for her lay the eggs, and swap out the genes. I’ll raise my own army of warriors.”
Any pity Kil’ree had for Z’lun had probably just evaporated in a minor nuclear explosion of wrath down on the engine deck. If M’fel didn’t kill him, Kil’ree would. V’han had to try and keep Z’lun’s attention. He seemed to be responding to logic, maybe he could still be talked out of this madness. “Kil’ree can’t lay enough eggs to repopulate our entire species, even with chemical help. Nowhere near enough. You’d kill her if you tried to pump her full of fertility drugs without training. The only one with training is M’fel, making him part of your master plan as well, Z’lun, and he won’t do that to her. M’fel’s not expendable, Kil’ree’s not expendable, and I’m not expendable. Z’lun, the only one who is expendable here…is you.”
He heard air hissing through Z’lun’s spiracles as he prepared to shout an angry negation…and then he heard a sickening crunch and a wet thud. M’fel’s quiet voice murmured a soft, “I’m sorry, Z’lun. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
V’han tried to speak, to say something, anything. It took him three tries to get his voice working again, and it sounded rough when it finally came out. “M’fel?”
“Yes, V’han?”
“Is he…dead?”
A long, poignant pause. “No. I couldn’t, V’han. He would have slain us all, but I couldn’t take his life from him. But he’s not going to be hurting anyone ever again.”
An icy chill raced through V’han. “What did you do, M’fel?”
“I crushed his neural column, right below his head. He’ll be confined to a bed for the rest of his life, and he may never regain consciousness.”
“I…oh. Oh gods. Oh gods, poor Z’lun,” Kil’ree’s voice sobbed out of the ‘com. The woman could forgive anyone. V’han was just relieved that Z’lun hadn’t made a murderer of gentle M’fel.
“Where are you, Kil’ree?” V’han asked.
“I’m in computer control. M’fel contacted me and asked me to pop the locks on the weaponry room doors,” she said shakily.
“Please go back to the engine room. But…before you do…could you do some editing of the computer records?”
“What do you want changed, V’han?” Kil’ree’s voice was a mixture of confusion and growing warmth. Perhaps she suspected what he was about to ask of her.
“Delete that entire conversation from the ‘com records. Z’lun…Z’lun was badly injured during our rough landing while trying to stabilize the ship. He served admirably, and never gave his colleagues any trouble. His noble sacrifice will make him the hero of this mission.”
“Yes, I can do that, but V’han…why?”
“Because it could have been one of us who went space-happy like that. Because we should have seen that something was wrong and actually talked to Z’lun instead of shunning him. Because he was actually listening to reason near the end. He could have dropped that bomb the moment we entered orbit, and he didn’t. He wanted to be talked out of it, I think.” V’han’s antennae drooped, but whether it was from relief or regret, even he wasn’t sure.
“You’re being generous, V’han.” M’fel’s voice was gruff with repressed emotion.
“We can afford to be generous, M’fel. As you so aptly put it, he’ll never be hurting anyone ever again. I’d rather pretend that this didn’t happen than face the thought that we’re probably responsible for this tragedy. Cowardly, I know, but I’ve never been the bravest person,” V’han managed in something approaching a confident voice.
M’fel made a soft hiss of assent. “I’ll take him to the medical bay and try to make him more comfortable. M’fel out.”
“Kil’ree?”
“Working, V’han. I’ll be done in a few minutes, and then we can start atmospheric entry procedures. I’ll call you when I’m done. Kil’ree out.”
V’han stood alone in the silent control center. He turned to the viewscreen, looking at the world that the three of them had just saved. It looked serene, undisturbed under its blanket of clouds and air, as if it hadn’t just been threatened with being pulverized into radioactive rubble. After Kil’ree was done, that event wouldn’t exist except in their memories. He touched a few commands into the sensor controls, and turned the viewscreen to a rear view, looking out at the diamond-like stars.
He stared at them. They were beautiful, full of adventure and danger and excitement. He stretched out a three-clawed hand, reaching for those steady-shining specks. He closed his claws around one. Squeezed tight.
Then let it go. He was giving up his wings for his people, for there was no job for a spaceship pilot on a new-settled planet. Z’lun had been right about that. But he could work hard with the others, get their new world started…and then he would ask for a small spaceship. As one of the heroes of the mighty voyage across the void, the governors would be committing political suicide to deny him such a trifling thing. There were always possibilities, possibilities that Z’lun had, in his madness, refused to see.
Yes, he was giving up his wings. But only temporarily.
He was no one’s slave. He would fly again one day.
This is a story about a whale...no! This is a story about being happy! It's the happy happy joy joy story!
*smacks self*
Actually, this is a story about finding a new home, and what happens when someone doesn't want to stop roaming.
He had found it.
The image of the planet on the viewscreen made V’han’s delicately feathered antennae quiver with joy. The oceans on this unnamed planet shone like sapphires with reflected sunlight. The hazy bubble of the atmosphere seemed to glow as it rounded the curve of the globe to disappear beyond the terminator and slip into quiet night. He could see continents and large islands glittering with emerald-green vegetation and the silvery threads of rivers on the screen’s magnification of the world.
His long silver talons stroked the smooth orb of the sensor panel, and brought up a smaller screen to display the scan data on the planet. He had to bite back an ululation of happiness—it was perfect, perfect beyond belief. No intelligent life, but abundant flora and fauna. The atmosphere was well within the tolerance levels for his kind, the gravity was the same. This star’s rays, unlike the sun on his former home, brought life, not painful death from lashing solar flares and the silent poison of radiation. And this entire solar system was completely unclaimed.
At last, at long last, his people had found a new home. It took all his concentration to tear his multi-faceted violet eyes from the front screen to enter in the long-unused code for orbital entry to the helm panel. The mighty ship, shaped like a quicksilver teardrop with blue-glowing engine ports in the rounded stern, groaned, decelerating slowly into orbit so that it would not jar its precious cargo—over 20,000 cryogenically frozen people. The miniscule crew that actually ran this massive hulk had been the only ones awake for this whole cruise. They’d had to deal with food shortages, unfriendly ships, spatial dangers like uncharted black holes, and the loneliness and creeping hopelessness of their seemingly impossible quest.
Their quest was over, now. They had found the unfindable—an unclaimed life-supporting world. They’d had to roam far, far away from the established spacelanes, but they had found it.
V’han couldn’t help it—he leapt up from the helm panel and did a spinning jump of joy, indigo and purple wings flaring in the dull, recycled air of the control center. Color-scales filled the air as they were brushed loose from the delicate, veined membranes by his sudden exertion, sparkling like pixie dust as they drifted on the air, settling on the slick metal of the instrument panels, swirling between the delicate floating spheres of the ship’s guidance systems, shimmering as they were caught in the light from the holoprojectors for the viewscreen, dusting his soft pale grey skin with the magic of his happiness.
He had to tell the others.
He called Kil’ree and M’fel immediately to tell them that at long last their travels were over. Kil’ree’s shimmering song of jubilation rang through the intercom as she danced before the gleaming crystalline matrix of their engines. He could hear her toe-claws ringing on the metal grating of the deck through the speakers. The mighty engines she had kept running all through these years and these trials would soon be converted to planetary power sources.
M’fel’s reaction was more subdued, but he seemed happy as well, his softly hissing voice echoing faintly in the great vault of the cryogenics monitoring room. M’fel was like that—he never got too loud. Even at the year-dances back home, M’fel had been quiet and sober. But V’han could almost hear M’fel’s antennae puffing with elation in that way that they did when he was especially pleased but didn’t want to show it.
V’han was not looking forward to telling Z’lun. He thought that the long trip had warped Z’lun a bit. He would make these jokes about ejecting the cryo-tubes and saving themselves the power they needed to maintain them—except they didn’t sound like jokes, not until (a second too late) he would flare his scarlet and gold wings and curl his antennae and laugh his tinny laugh that always made M’fel grind his mandibles audibly. Kil’ree said it was the isolation, that Z’lun would be fine when they found their new planet and could feel healthy sunlight on his wings, taste the freshness of vegetables not grown in a hydroponics bay, smell the flower-laden breeze playing with his antennae, talk to more than just three others.
V’han and M’fel agreed that Kil’ree was just being kind. Z’lun had always given him the creeps, and probably always would. They had no choice but to put up with him, though. No one else knew spaceborne weaponry and tactics like Z’lun did.
Still, Z’lun had to be told. Surprising him during landing would not be a good idea. Reluctantly, V’han dialed in the code for the weaponry room.
Z’lun’s responding voice scraped out of the tiny speakers and into his eardrums like someone rasping a serrated blade across the most sensitive tips of his antennae. V’han involuntarily closed his eyes, shuddering. Z’lun was in rare form today.
“We have found our new home, Z’lun. It’s perfect. We’ll be making atmospheric entry within a planetary rotation. M’fel’s already started thawing out the first group.”
There. He’d said it. Now he could shut off the ‘com and hope Z’lun left him alone until they made planetfall.
Z’lun’s voice stopped his hand as he reached to touch the ruby marble that deactivated the intercom. “You’re giving up? Just like that?”
“What’s this ‘giving up’ of which you speak, Z’lun? We’re done. We can stop roaming now. No more scraping for food, no more trying to evade K’inti patrol ships, no more quiet! We. Are. Home.” This was getting weird, even for a conversation with Z’lun. The misbegotten mammal-spawn could at least have the courtesy to keep his heretical opinions to himself when everyone else obviously didn’t share them.
“You’re rejecting the stars. You’re giving up freedom for what we were ordered to do years ago by men and women too old and too sun-addled to do their own work. You’re a slave, V’han, nothing more. You’ll get a pat on the head from our governors, a comfortable pension for the rest of your life, maybe a few statues in your honor. ‘Our hero,’ they will call you, those who were too cowardly to make their own voyage. In exchange, you will willingly sever your wings so that you will spend the rest of your life grounded, looking up at what was once within claw’s-grasp and wondering if you should have decided differently,” Z’lun spat, mandibles clicking audibly with each enraged utterance. V’han could hear his claws squeaking on something glass as he clenched them.
“Z’lun, you’re crazy.”
“You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you V’han? You and M’fel. Kil’ree listens to me at least, but she thinks I’ll change my mind once we make planetfall. She’s wrong. You’re all wrong. But I’ll show you.” The icy hand of fear clenched V’han’s spiracles, stopping his breath. He quietly tapped the code to make this a four-way conversation. Maybe M’fel could do something. M’fel was trained to preserve life, but in this case he might have to take it to save their lives and the lives of their entire race. He prayed they’d both have the sense to stay silent when the ‘com line opened up.
“What are you going to do, Z’lun?” His voice sounded distressingly squeaky in his own eardrums, but the question needed to be asked. Their weapons officer was completely insane and in control of enough firepower to devastate the planet below them, gleaming like a gemstone on the black background of space but infinitely more precious.
He could hear Z’lun’s wings snapping out in an aggression-display. “I’m going to drop a planetcracker bomb on the planet below, since you so kindly put us in close equatorial orbit.”
“We don’t have planetcracker weaponry, Z’lun,” V’han said, antennae curling close to his head in shock.
Z’lun laughed that awful, acidic laugh of his. “We do now. I’ve had a lot of time with very little to do, V’han, since you were so disobliging as to avoid combat with other ships. You denied me the prizes of conquest I so richly deserved, so I think I’ll kill you, as an example to the other two. I need Kil’ree, but I’m willing to bet I can learn either your job or M’fel’s.”
V’han felt his knee joints locking with a combination of terror and rage. “You can’t kill me, Z’lun. The helm controls took me ten sun-rounds to learn while I had the best teachers our world could offer. How can you learn them by yourself in a few planetary rotations? Besides, the helm controls are coded to me, and I’m not planning on giving you access.” He tried to sound calm and reasonable. He prayed he did. He prayed that Z’lun wasn’t so insane that he’d ignore logic. He prayed that M’fel was listening and coming to the same conclusion that V’han had.
Z’lun had to die.
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, broken only by the sound of Z’lun’s claws clicking on panels and control spheres. Probably verifying V’han’s claims. V’han heard faint cursing, then a bitter-sounding, “Fine. M’fel will die, then. We won’t need him once I eject the cryo-tubes.”
V’han stopped breathing for the second time in the conversation. Their entire race, wiped out at the whim of a madman. If M’fel hadn’t been ready to kill him before, he would be now. It was just a matter of time. M’fel was twice Z’lun’s size—if he took him by surprise, he could kill or seriously injure him with ease. For now, he needed to keep Z’lun distracted. “You’ll need him if you ever get hurt, Z’lun. He’s the only one who can perform surgery on this ship. And how are you planning on perpetuating our species if you eject the cryo-tubes? Surely you’re not so mad as to want the extinction of our entire people.”
“That’s what I need Kil’ree for. We have the frozen genetic material stockpile; all I have to do is give Kil’ree fertility-enhancing drugs, wait for her lay the eggs, and swap out the genes. I’ll raise my own army of warriors.”
Any pity Kil’ree had for Z’lun had probably just evaporated in a minor nuclear explosion of wrath down on the engine deck. If M’fel didn’t kill him, Kil’ree would. V’han had to try and keep Z’lun’s attention. He seemed to be responding to logic, maybe he could still be talked out of this madness. “Kil’ree can’t lay enough eggs to repopulate our entire species, even with chemical help. Nowhere near enough. You’d kill her if you tried to pump her full of fertility drugs without training. The only one with training is M’fel, making him part of your master plan as well, Z’lun, and he won’t do that to her. M’fel’s not expendable, Kil’ree’s not expendable, and I’m not expendable. Z’lun, the only one who is expendable here…is you.”
He heard air hissing through Z’lun’s spiracles as he prepared to shout an angry negation…and then he heard a sickening crunch and a wet thud. M’fel’s quiet voice murmured a soft, “I’m sorry, Z’lun. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
V’han tried to speak, to say something, anything. It took him three tries to get his voice working again, and it sounded rough when it finally came out. “M’fel?”
“Yes, V’han?”
“Is he…dead?”
A long, poignant pause. “No. I couldn’t, V’han. He would have slain us all, but I couldn’t take his life from him. But he’s not going to be hurting anyone ever again.”
An icy chill raced through V’han. “What did you do, M’fel?”
“I crushed his neural column, right below his head. He’ll be confined to a bed for the rest of his life, and he may never regain consciousness.”
“I…oh. Oh gods. Oh gods, poor Z’lun,” Kil’ree’s voice sobbed out of the ‘com. The woman could forgive anyone. V’han was just relieved that Z’lun hadn’t made a murderer of gentle M’fel.
“Where are you, Kil’ree?” V’han asked.
“I’m in computer control. M’fel contacted me and asked me to pop the locks on the weaponry room doors,” she said shakily.
“Please go back to the engine room. But…before you do…could you do some editing of the computer records?”
“What do you want changed, V’han?” Kil’ree’s voice was a mixture of confusion and growing warmth. Perhaps she suspected what he was about to ask of her.
“Delete that entire conversation from the ‘com records. Z’lun…Z’lun was badly injured during our rough landing while trying to stabilize the ship. He served admirably, and never gave his colleagues any trouble. His noble sacrifice will make him the hero of this mission.”
“Yes, I can do that, but V’han…why?”
“Because it could have been one of us who went space-happy like that. Because we should have seen that something was wrong and actually talked to Z’lun instead of shunning him. Because he was actually listening to reason near the end. He could have dropped that bomb the moment we entered orbit, and he didn’t. He wanted to be talked out of it, I think.” V’han’s antennae drooped, but whether it was from relief or regret, even he wasn’t sure.
“You’re being generous, V’han.” M’fel’s voice was gruff with repressed emotion.
“We can afford to be generous, M’fel. As you so aptly put it, he’ll never be hurting anyone ever again. I’d rather pretend that this didn’t happen than face the thought that we’re probably responsible for this tragedy. Cowardly, I know, but I’ve never been the bravest person,” V’han managed in something approaching a confident voice.
M’fel made a soft hiss of assent. “I’ll take him to the medical bay and try to make him more comfortable. M’fel out.”
“Kil’ree?”
“Working, V’han. I’ll be done in a few minutes, and then we can start atmospheric entry procedures. I’ll call you when I’m done. Kil’ree out.”
V’han stood alone in the silent control center. He turned to the viewscreen, looking at the world that the three of them had just saved. It looked serene, undisturbed under its blanket of clouds and air, as if it hadn’t just been threatened with being pulverized into radioactive rubble. After Kil’ree was done, that event wouldn’t exist except in their memories. He touched a few commands into the sensor controls, and turned the viewscreen to a rear view, looking out at the diamond-like stars.
He stared at them. They were beautiful, full of adventure and danger and excitement. He stretched out a three-clawed hand, reaching for those steady-shining specks. He closed his claws around one. Squeezed tight.
Then let it go. He was giving up his wings for his people, for there was no job for a spaceship pilot on a new-settled planet. Z’lun had been right about that. But he could work hard with the others, get their new world started…and then he would ask for a small spaceship. As one of the heroes of the mighty voyage across the void, the governors would be committing political suicide to deny him such a trifling thing. There were always possibilities, possibilities that Z’lun had, in his madness, refused to see.
Yes, he was giving up his wings. But only temporarily.
He was no one’s slave. He would fly again one day.
