Chapter 1

A Lords of the Stars Novelette

Mattias von Schantz

October 12, 2718, Kerrma-non, Jerr

If she was honest about it, her office was a little bit messy.

Special Agent Rehema Nyasi looked at her desk. Keeping things neatly in order had never been her strong suit. Not that she had any kind of problem with order—on the contrary, as a Sunguard Special Agent, enforcing order was her entire purpose in life. But little things like where to put her stapler after using it, or how many pieces of paper she had on her desk, seemed so inconsequential when the rest of her day was all about keeping the 100 billion citizens of the Terran Federation safe.

She took a deep breath.

Or, she thought to herself, she could stop postponing reorganizing her desk, and start getting her things in better order, if only just a little.

To her side, her comm unit lit up. The Sunguard’s emblem it had displayed before—a grinning black wolf’s head in front of a burning solar disk—disappeared. In its place, the weathered face of Admiral Andrew Boise, the highest-ranking regular Sunguard officer on Jerr, appeared on the small screen.

Saved by the bell, Nyasi thought. But the admiral looked tired. Jerr could be a difficult world to be stationed on, indeed. There had been a time when life here hadn’t been hard, but ever since the second uprising the planet had been a quagmire. Despite looking like she was in her early thirties, she was over half a millennium old by now, and she still fondly remembered those early centuries of Pax Lupi.

“Good evening, ma’am,” Admiral Boise greeted her. Nyasi returned his good wishes, but without reciprocating the honorific.

Unfazed, the admiral continued. “We are getting a new detachment of soldiers coming in from Mars tomorrow. Two battalions of regular soldiers, together with armored vehicles, will be arriving on the Volgograd. They’re accompanied by another Special Agent.”

Well, they could use the reinforcements, Nyasi thought. The activities of the reestablished Jerrassian Liberation Front had been growing stronger these past months, and the Sunguard forces on Jerr had found themselves in a losing battle against the guerilla tactics employed by the insurgents.

“Sounds good,” she said. “I trust we have enough bunks ready for the new soldiers?”

“I will make a note to remind Colonel Montgomery to double check that, ma’am,” the admiral replied. “But I am sure she has already handled it.”

After a brief pause, he continued.

“There is some fear the JLF will attempt to strike at the convoy as it is traveling from the airport to Reagan Base,” he explained. “Intelligence indicates there might be a terrorist presence in Fotar-mer District. I want you to clear out the buildings along the road there, ma’am, to make sure we can easily spot any insurgents in the area.”

Special Agent Nyasi thought for a while. Her biotic brain was directly connected to the Sunguard data store through the permanent radio link inside her communications cortex, and from it, she recalled the city map with perfect precision.

“Those buildings mostly consist of low income housing,” she stated. She leaned forward towards the camera. “No, I will not do it.”

If Admiral Boise was taken aback by her refusal, he didn’t show it. One didn’t rise to the rank of admiral by questioning superiors.

Still, he did his best to get his suggestion across to Special Agent Nyasi.

“But the order’s coming directly from the Solar Command, ma’am!” he insisted.

“Then why am I talking to you right now, and not to High Admiral Cameron?”

Nyasi had trouble hiding her frustration. She understood Admiral Boise was used to commanding subordinates, and she realized that, at times, he might have mistaken her previous acceptance of his suggestions for her following orders. But as a Special Agent, she was not part of his chain of command.

“The order just came through, ma’am,” Admiral Boise explained. “I just wanted to relay it to you as soon as I saw it.”

Nyasi had no doubt that was true, but that didn’t mean she had to admit it to Admiral Boise. Until she saw the authenticated order herself, it was technically just a rumor, which gave her the opportunity to ignore it at will. And to be perfectly honest, not even High Admiral Cameron himself had the authority to tell her what to do, not unless he acted in his capacity as Supreme Commander of the Sunguard.

“I will go out there in the morning to see what is going on,” she finally told the admiral, without committing to anything. With nothing else to say, she broke off the call.

* * *

The orange sun was already high in the sky when Special Agent Nyasi arrived in Fotar-mer District. This time of year, the weather was usually clear and dry, with the dust storms sweeping in from the northern plains not yet strong enough to drape the city in the haze it tended to hide behind later in summer.

The townhouses along the main boulevard were old and made from wood, their panels faded from decades of exposure to rain, wind and sun. Most of the buildings were two or three stories high, with one family living on each floor. Between them and the street were small dirt yards, speckled with patches of dry grass, their borders lined with dead hedges or decrepit fences.

“Have you seen my cat?”

The voice behind her was Jerrassian, but did not have the typical guttural growl she was used to hearing from the stocky, furry natives. When Nyasi turned around, a small cub—a girl, perhaps five or six years old—stood there looking at her, dressed in a bright blue bodysuit.

Special Agent Nyasi squatted down in front of the young girl.

“Hi there!” she said in Interstellar. “What’s your name?”

The girl looked at her with round, black eyes. After a few seconds, she answered with a single word: “Tok.”

“Hi Tok! That’s a beautiful name.”

It really wasn’t, Nyasi thought. Jerrassian names didn’t have meaning—they were just arbitrary sounds chosen by the parents. Typically, their first names were very short, just one or two syllables—enough to identify the individual members of a family, but beyond that, they carried no meaning.

And sure enough, the alien girl looked at her in confusion, unable to comprehend the notion that a name could be beautiful.

“What’s yours?” she asked, after what felt like a minute of the two staring at each other.

“I’m Rehema,” the Sunguard Special Agent replied. “What’s your cat’s name?”

“Mr. Whiskers,” the girl replied quickly, her face flashing Nyasi a quick smile at the thought of her pet, before she remembered he was now gone, and the smile turned into sadness again.

Oh, Nyasi thought. So it really was a cat. She had assumed the alien girl’s use of the word had been nothing more than a mistranslation of a name for a native species, but Jerrassian paramammals didn’t have whiskers—Tok had apparently adopted a real Terran feline. She hadn’t expected that, not in this neighborhood.

“How come your pet is a cat?” she asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

“It was born that way,” the girl explained patiently.

Silly me, Nyasi thought.

“Not many people have cats for pets. Where did you get it?”

“Adrian gave it to me,” Tok said, her eyes gazing down the street in front of them. With her own eyes, Nyasi followed the direction the girl was looking in, but didn’t see anything of interest there.

“Is Adrian a neighbor?” she queried, assuming she already knew the answer but wanting to build trust by keeping the conversation with the girl going.

“His skin isn’t normal,” Tok said, switching topics without warning, the way only children can do and still make it seem natural.

Adrian’s skin, or Mr. Whiskers’? Nyasi wasn’t sure.

“He’s pale,” the girl continued. “Not normal like you and me.”

Adrian, then, Nyasi thought.

Despite how it sounded, there was nothing inherently prejudiced in what the girl had said. Jerr was a world with only two continents, but they were joined together, and throughout millennia, the early Jerrassians had wandered back and forth across them. Consequently—unlike Terrans—Jerassians weren’t divided into geographical subgroups. All Jerrassians, no matter where they were from, had the same skin color—black. Just like Nyasi’s own skin.

To the little girl, having black skin was the only normal way to be, and everything else seemed unnatural to her.

And Adrian, apparently, did not share the Jerrassians’ black skin. Given his Terran sounding name, and the fact that he had given the girl a Terran cat, it was now obvious to Nyasi the man himself must be Terran, too, despite living in what was clearly a Jerrrassian-dominated neighborhood.

“Maybe,” she said to Tok, “Mr. Whiskers has gone to visit Adrian. Perhaps we should go there and say hello?”

The alien girl eagerly shook her head in a silent yes, then took Special Agent Nyasi’s hand and started walking down the street, carefully stopping to look both ways before crossing. Two minutes later, they arrived at Adrian’s house, where the old Terran was sitting on the broken stairs of his house, caressing a tiger-colored cat.

It took Nyasi’s biotic brain less than a millisecond to upload an image of Adrian’s face to the intelligent computers back at Reagan Base and receive a reply with his identity, retrieved from the Sunguard’s database of Terran Federation citizens.

“Good morning, Mr. Nielsen,” she said, nodding at him.

“Hello,” the old man replied, somewhat absentmindedly, before turning his attention to Tok. “Mr. Whiskers wanted to come and say hello to his sisters.” He turned his head to indicate the two other cats sitting beside him. “I hope he didn’t make you worry for him.”

The little girl didn’t reply, but instead rushed forward to embrace her beloved pet, her face now shining with a smile that for a second made Nyasi feel like everything was well with the world.

After cross-referencing Adrian Nielsen with the Sunguard’s criminal records database and finding no matches, Nyasi asked the old man if he could walk the girl back home later.

“Of course,” Adrian replied. “I’ll make sure she gets home safely. I understand you’re busy, Miss Nyasi.”

His use of her name without first having introduced herself didn’t surprise her—there were only six Special Agents permanently stationed on Jerr, and while the other five were assigned to regional districts on the planet, she was the one responsible for the whole world. And her plain gray jumpsuit, with red stripes running down its sides, effectively identified her as a Sunguard Special Agent.

“Thank you, Mr. Nielsen,” she said, nodding to him in farewell before walking further down the street. She had already spent most of the time she had originally intended to use for assessing security threats in the area—now, the Sunguard convoy was approaching from the east.

A few minutes later, the first armored cars had rounded a curve in the road and were visible from the street where Special Agent Nyasi was standing. They were painted in camouflage patterns of brown and gray, their angles harsh and sharp, as if their very look was designed to instill fear in anyone who saw them.

Without warning, a bright light streaked across the sky from the roof of one of the buildings lining the street, striking the first vehicle of the convoy. Nyasi reacted instinctively, throwing herself to the side and rolling into cover behind a large metal trash bin, rusty from years of neglect, that stood on the pavement.

Admiral Boise had been right all along!

Even as a biot, she had no time to escape—not even biotic muscles could outrun the shockwave of an explosion. What they could do, however, was to protect her from the effects of it. The artificial cells—microscopic, self-replicating computer chips—that made up her body were a hundred times stronger and more resilient than their biological counterparts. While the wave of shrapnel that washed over her shredded her jumpsuit and skin, the damage was only superficial.

The pain was not a problem—for a Sunguard Special Agent, pain was optional. As a biot, she was designed to operate in three distinct pain modes. Normally, her brain worked just like the biological brains from which its design was copied: if she was hurt, she felt pain, just like a biological human would. But while the evolutionary purpose of pain was to help prevent the recipient from suffering further damage, in practice, pain could also be crippling if it was too strong. That’s where her second pain mode came into play: in that mode, her brain would consciously register the damage to her body and automatically emulate the behavior of a typical pain response, but she would not actually feel the pain. While her body might be temporarily crippled by the emulated pain response, her mind would remain unaffected.

Then there was, of course, the third pain mode—one where she registered the damage but neither felt nor reacted to it. This, she thought, was combat mode, as she activated it in the aftermath of the attack.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Soldiers of Heart and Steel is entirely standalone, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Twilight Duty, which serves as something of a prequel to this story, and Choices of Steel, which is a sequel.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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