…and this is the last day of the thirty days thingy.  Hurrah.

For a thousand years, mankind spread across the galaxy, relying on the nearly miraculous Hauser dive to fling them faster than light. The United Nations metamorphosed, taking on more and more and more authority. The single, unified UN government at the height of mankind’s expansion reached some two hundred and fifty worlds scattered across a region of space that stretched as far as the Aquila Rift.

And then it came crashing down.

The human intergalactic civilization was tenuous at best. Worlds were easily isolated, lost, forgotten. Records were scarce, and the precise region for the collapse was unknown. It could have been plague, or war, or any of another hundred reasons. Within a century the home world had been lost, and the colonies of humankind began to forget about their brethren.  (more…)

“What kind of place is Geneva?” Isaac asked Kadeshi one day, suddenly. “is it like here?”

Kadeshi was the only one of the strangers who decided to stay in this village – the rest had struck east, to head into Quellem proper.  He had become the resident tinker – though he called himself a “mechanic.”  When he wasn’t fixing the simple machines the village had, he was experimenting with something he called “internal combustion.”

“Why do you ask?” he said, fiddling with some piece of machinery.

“I just was wondering,” Isaac said.  “I asked the school-teacher and he said there was a place on Earth that was called Geneva.”

“My home is named after that place,” Kadeshi said.  he shrugged.  “It’s a place, like any other.  Some parts are nice, some aren’t.”

“Why’d you leave it?” Isaac couldn’t imagine leaving the little village where he had been born.

“Because sometimes a person can do more for your people outside of your home than in it.”

166 Words.

It didn’t take long for the strangers to become accustomed to living in the village.  Isaac overheard his parents remarking one night that it was scary how quickly they had all picked up the local language.  They had spoken something like it, only incredibly archaic when they had arrived – within four or five days they were able to make themselves understood, and within a month of arriving most of the strangers were completely fluent.

They declined to let the village know precisely where they were from, but explained that they were from a long ways away.  One of them – their leader – referred to a place called Geneva, though he didn’t say much about it.

The thing that had frightened everyone, with its grasping arms and bulbous eyes and horrifying mouth-parts, explained that it was a creature called a Kafkan, and that his people were allies and trading partners for the Genevans.  Even he was accepted by the villagers, eventually.

162 Words.

The noise woke everyone in the village, and they all rushed to the waterfront to see what had happened. They found a strange, rough-hewn ship, something like the triremes from the south, wrecked beyond repair, and the remains of their dock tangled in this strange wreck.

Crawling from the ship were people that Isaac had never seen before.

Then one of them pulled a monster out of the wreckage, and someone screamed.

The strange people with their smooth clothing formed a protective ring around the monster, as if they feared for its safety. A woman screamed again, and the… whatever it was, shook itself and said something. They knew it was speaking a human language because the humans responded as if they understood, speaking in similar tones. Their voices were tense, worried.

Isaac slipped from his parents’ hands, and crept forwards. He heard his father call, but ignored the command.

150 Words.

When Isaac was seven, the strange visitor from the sky fell.

Perhaps fall wasn’t the right word for it. There was doubtlessly some control in its fall, because all the astronomers (the two that Isaac knew, anyways) agreed that had it been uncontrolled there was no way that the visitor could have glided to a relatively soft landing on an island hundreds of miles off of the coast. Its passage caused sonic booms that shook the thin walls of the houses of Isaac’s village, and threw up great waves that battered at the shorefront without causing significant damage.

It wasn’t the first object to fall to ground in the memory of the villagers, but it was the largest the elders could remember. Even then there was little interest, until, a few weeks later, a ship crashed into the docks of the tiny village at midnight.

145 Words.

I can see it in the way you stare at me, eyes not quite seeing; face not quite tightening into a mirror-expression the way I expect. You’re not all there, and that lack of something in your gaze scares me – deeply. I am afraid of you, though I don’t want to admit it, and so as I walk towards you I stuff my hands in my pocket, and hold my head high. I look at you, and past you – try to ignore you even though a part of me wants to ask you, “how did this happen?”

You walk towards me as I walk towards you, not quite meeting my gaze, and just as we would pass, you veer off, apparently taken by something you see in the bushes at the side of the road. I don’t understand it, but you do this like it’s a regular occurrence.

One of your companions steps up close to me, and flashes two fingers in my face – “V.” It startles me.

168 Words.

One thing they never tell you is how boring space combat is.

Even when engaging each other at relatively close range, as we were, there was no dog fighting, no climbing and banking and fancy cobra turns and death-defying rolls and spins. There were two ships, one looking something like a brick with engines, and the other shaped something like a teardrop with a pearl pressed into it, maneuvering in deep space at relativistic speeds. Weapons took minutes to hit their targets, and though we possessed FTL travel and communication, detection and ranging was limited by speed-of-light.

From our inertial frame, we simply drifted in the coldness of space, occasionally lit by the hard white light of a fusion warhead being speared by our point defense systems, or by the larger, tropical colors of exotic weapons being destroyed or activated. Even with the stress of potential destruction hovering over us like a sword, it was hard not to be bored by the engagement.

That would all change when our shields flickered and died.

173 Words.

I know there’s a long tradition of hazing the new guy on Genevan boats, but the crew of the Gustavus took it to absurd lengths. Sure, the new guy’s whining, you might say dismissively. Everyone has it bad the first couple of days on the job, right?

Even the AI of the ship was taking part! That’s excessive by any standards, not just the ones I happened to be using.

Anyways, as annoying as Asteague was, at least he didn’t haze me. So after enduring humiliations galore from the other humans – and in spite of how annoying I tended to find him – I ended up spending a lot of time with the plucky fellow.

114 Words.

I didn’t fit into the crew very well. I was the youngest member of the Gustavus’s complement, the only new crewman to be brought aboard at its last refitting.

Part of this was the relatively low turnover of the crew: Kadeshi was given extraordinary latitude in choosing his subordinates, probably because he was an immature ass who also happened to moonlight as a brilliant scientist of many stripes. Part of this was also probably because they had lost precisely one crewman on their last mission, and so Kadeshi decided to replace just the one dead guy.

At least they cleaned out the dead guy’s stuff before moving me into his bunk – I’ll give them that. Also nice was that because Gustavus had been refitted with the latest automation a year or so back, there were only twenty crewmen aboard a ship with room for a hundred or more, so I got a cabin to myself.

On the downside, the ship also had a Kafkan onboard, and he immediately latched himself on to me. The Kafkan was named asteague, and was one of those rare Kafkans who suffered from a psychological disorder they called the Fascination.

He was very annoying.

199 Words.

You’ve probably heard of the Gustavus Adolphus. It’s not a particularly new ship, though it was the Lead Ship of its class when it was commissioned. It is, however, the basis of operations for one Kadeshi Ikaya, a human who is famous throughout human space.

Kadeshi’s a sort of a hero, a romantic secret agent responsible for making contact with two of the three known alien species in local space, and a sort of Renaissance man who has kept human knowledge of the galaxy one jump ahead of the Noh for the past two hundred years or so. He’s also one of the oldest living people, having continued to be rejuvenated long past the cut-off for the average man or woman.

That’s all propaganda, of course. None of it has ever bothered to mention what an enormous prick he was, or indeed just how big all of this derring-do had made his ego.

153 Words.