Chapter 5

The voyage back to Jerr had been uneventful, much to her regret. The quiet calm onboard the commercial passenger liner she had chosen to travel on had given her too much time to think. Too much time to remember the horrors she had witnessed in Fotar-mer District.

And too much time to fume over the Solar Council’s unwillingness to do something about the Sunguard’s increasingly heavy-handed interpretations of its policies. Her conversation with Secretary General Lorg-mark-tel-nul had been polite and informative, but ultimately had led to nothing.

Sometimes, she was overwhelmed by feelings of dread—fear for a future in which non-Terrans no longer had a place in her beloved Federation. Other times, feelings of hopelessness gripped her heart. No matter what she did, no one seemed willing to listen. No one had the strength to open their eyes to see.

It was all too easy for people to follow along. Things changed so slowly that they didn’t really see that anything was different now compared to a lifetime ago. In a sense, it wasn’t really their fault, Special Agent Nyasi acknowledged. Biological lifetimes were so short. They didn’t have the perspective she did; they didn’t see how the Terran Federation of today differed from how it had been when she had first been taken online.

But Rehema Nyasi was 524 years old. She saw.

Back then, in the golden age during the early centuries of Pax Lupi, the notion that people could be assigned different values based on race, gender, or status had been preposterous. Such barbaric ideas had rightfully died with Old Earth. When the first biotic Special Agents— her generation—had been designed, they had been made genetically loyal to the ideals of the Terran Federation—as they were back in those days. And as far as Special Agent Nyasi knew, the loyalty genes had stayed unaltered through the centuries, even when new iterations of biots had been designed. It made sense that those genes had never been updated. They were so central to the very concept of what it meant to be a Sunguard Special Agent that they affected everything related to their development and function.

For the past half-millennium, the Special Agents had been seen as the perfect enforcers for the Sunguard—always loyal, always incorruptible, always devoted to the Terran Federation. Now, centuries later, no one dared to change anything so fundamental to their design.

Which probably accounted for Special Agent Lami’s visceral reaction to having been forced to participate in the Fotar-mer massacre, Nyasi thought.

When the passenger liner eventually landed at Kerrma-non Airport, she waited to disembark until the last of the other passengers had left the ship. For a minute, she sat alone in silence, gathering her strength before she had to exit the confines of the starcraft and step out into a world fallen from grace.

As she sat there, the economy-class flight stewardess came walking down the aisle, looking for forgotten bags or lost toy animals. She was a Terran in her mid-twenties, with long, straight black hair and skin pale with hints of gold. The stewardess wore a sharp red dress, which contrasted nicely with the green ornamental band across her waist. In each ear, she wore a small silver earring in the shape of a fish, and around her neck hung a band of large, gleaming white pearls.

“How are you, miss?” the stewardess asked Nyasi when she reached her seat. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The stewardess might not have remembered her name, but Nyasi knew her jumpsuit gave away her identity. The woman undoubtedly knew she was a Special Agent.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Nyasi said absentmindedly, dismissing her.

She didn’t go away.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said. “All those years… everything you’ve had to endure, miss. But you’ve also been given the strength you need to stand tall in the face of darkness. I want you to know this—you’re not alone.”

Special Agent Nyasi looked up, surprised at the kind words the stewardess had offered. The young Terran had given her consolation and hope, when it should have been the other way around.

For once, Nyasi chose not to identify the woman. Though she could call up her personal identity record from the Terran Federation citizen database in a matter of milliseconds if she wanted to, this time she opted to keep the mystery. Whoever she was, she had spoken the words Nyasi needed to hear, at just the right moment, and she was immensely grateful for them.

* * *

The next time Special Agent Nyasi met Myan Lami, he was sitting at a table in the Officer’s Mess, twirling the spaghetti on his plate but clearly not in the mood to eat it.

Not that Sunguard Special Agents needed to eat. The electrical energy their biotic cells ran on was provided through the microscopic hyperspace portal inside their brains, semi-permanently connected to the Sunguard. As a backup, they also had a biotically grown radiothermal power plant inside their chests.

In a pinch, they could also convert the chemical energy in food to the electrical energy they needed. But most of the time, the Special Agents—being fundamentally human—ate simply because they enjoyed the taste of food.

Which clearly Special Agent Lami did not do today. Well, at least he wasn’t throwing up anymore, Nyasi thought.

“You seem better,” she said as she sat down in the beige plastic chair across from him.

Lami looked up at her. At first, he didn’t say anything.

“I am all right,” he finally told her.

“No, I am not,” he continued after pausing for a few seconds. “But I am better. Thank you, ma’am.”

Nyasi twirled the fork next to her own bowl of shrimp and garlic pasta. The aroma rising from the simple dish made her mouth water, but this wasn’t the right time to enjoy her meal. She needed to talk to Special Agent Lami. And chances were, he needed to talk to her as well.

She leaned forward.

“The waking nightmares are still bothering you?” she asked cautiously.

“Every time I close my eyes,” Lami said. “If I keep myself busy, I can forget, but only for a moment. The second I have time to think again, I remember.”

Nyasi sighed. There was nothing she could really say to comfort him in this. The truth was, this was to be his life from this point on. His biotic brain, with its perfect recall, would forever scream at him that what he had done had violated the most sacred of commands laid down in his genes: that all women and men were equal, even if they originated from different planets.

But she couldn’t say that to him, of course. Telling him such a truth would only be cruel. And besides, she was fairly sure he already knew that was to be his fate.

“Then do something good with those memories,” Nyasi said instead to the young Special Agent. “You know you did wrong. Now let that knowledge guide you into doing what’s right instead.”

“How?” he asked, exhausted from the emotional toll he was under. “I will never pick up a gun again. How can I do my job as a Special Agent without a gun, ma’am?”

“You still get the shakes?” she asked, at the same time both happy and sad that he couldn’t seem to get over the atrocities he had committed in the name of the Sunguard.

Lami sat quietly for a second or two.

“No,” he finally admitted. “I could use a gun—but I do not want to. I do not ever want to wield that kind of power over life and death. It is my vow that I will never aim a gun at a human being again.”

Nyasi sat quietly for a while, contemplating what the other Special Agent had just said. On one hand, she was impressed by his resolve and his willingness to act on his sense of right and wrong. On the other hand, she did see how such a radical decision might potentially create problems for him in the future. Clearly, Myan Lami was a person prone to rash decisions. She only hoped those decisions, rash as they were, would turn out to be good ones.

“It doesn’t really matter if you can hold a gun or not,” she told him in the end. “That’s not what makes you a Sunguard Special Agent. Your genes and your biotic nature do. Even if you won’t touch a gun again, you’re still a Special Agent. You always will be—even if you don’t believe it yourself.”

Lami thought for half a minute before he continued to explain himself to Nyasi.

“I am going away for a while,” he told her. “The Terran Federation is expanding, looking for new worlds around faraway stars, to be colonized before Nova Solaris sterilizes Mars. There are worlds out there, at the edge of known space, where I could do good without having to carry a gun. Dangerous worlds where my abilities as a Special Agent would be needed.”

He looked toward the ceiling, seemingly talking as much to himself as to Special Agent Nyasi.

“I could save lives out there,” he continued. “I could fulfill my duty as a Special Agent without having to go to war, ma’am.”

Nyasi nodded, understanding his need to be useful despite his commitment to never fire a gun again.

“Out there in the empty depths of space, there are no conflicts,” he declared. “No races standing against each other. No bigotry. No sides to be taken. Just explorers working against a hostile environment, for the betterment of the citizens of the Terran Federation.”

Nyasi wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t correct him. If this was what he needed to do to heal, then so be it. Out there, perhaps time would teach him the lessons he needed to learn.

“Where will you go?” she asked instead, not sure if Lami even knew himself.

“The first planet around Epsilon Indi A,” he explained, to her surprise. “It is a small world. Tidally locked with its star, but the termination zone is somewhat habitable, though the environment is harsh, with firestorms on the day side and hurricane-force blizzards perpetually raging on the night side. There is a Sunguard-led scientific expedition there right now.”

After a short pause, he continued. “Or was. We lost contact with it recently—I am sure you know the details already. If I could save them…”

Nyasi understood. His need to be useful and his determination to make up for the atrocities he had committed would drive him to take risks. Now, he would walk into hell itself if it gave him a purpose.

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

If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving it a like.