Native's Revenge Jul 05 '06    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Mildred D. Taylor - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Literature Unit From $8 Olivier Dunrea - Ollie From $7 The Bottom Line Revenge is always best served cold. I attended the festivities that day. We felt we deserved it. We had finally won, defeating the Tarion and driving them from the system. We thought we were heroes. Just five days before, we’d landed on the planet for the first time and touched what we’d been fighting and dying for all these years. It’s beautiful. (You’ll never be able to land so you’ll have to take my word for it.) Rich black soil. Every breeze brings a new scent, not quite roses, nearly orange blossoms, almost honeysuckle, but more fabulous and potent than any flower t home ever thought of being. Bees (or something similar) buzz from one brilliantly colored flower to another. Green trees stand a hundred feet tall, never having known a blade. Fields roll for leagues. Rivers, brimming with sweet water, twist to the horizon. All day long curios and fearless native animals visit our campsite. And at night, birds (or bats, no one’s really gotten a good look) sing a lilting lullaby. It’s a wonderful place to be alive. We were Unit 434. The Cowboys. (Reilly came up with the name, he’s very big on Ancient American history. Lucky Reilly.) We’d been fighting in this system for six years. Artemis, the brass told us, was "vital to the balance of power in this sector." Not to mention the 210,000 wealthy members of the new Church of Moses willing to pay dearly and pull strings to settle here. (Of course, the New Church of Moses leaders are only willing to pay dearly in a monetary sense. We were the ones who got to be separated from our families for seven years and risk our lives for their little paradise and its mineral rights. Mineral rights? Oh, in spades, this could be one of the wealthiest planets in the Union. The New Church of Moses doesn’t throw its weight around for a merely pretty planet. It’s got to be a planet that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams and you can believe normal folks like us don’t even match their regular dreams with our wildest dreams.) In six years of battle, the system had changed hands hundreds of times. We’d chase them out, they would trick us out. Back and forth. We had them out gunned and out manned, but they were incredibly clever. It really should have set off some warning bells in somebody’s mind when they turned tail and ran. But it didn’t because we were the Cowboys. And Cowboys always win in the end. We didn’t care how we won, and neither did the brass. That was why they gave us that Admiral they did. Excellent wartime leader, lousy peacetime leader. It’s just easier for some people to lead when everybody is mostly concerned with getting out alive. The Tarion had held the system for nine months. Long enough to establish a small base on the surface. It annoyed us that they beat us to the ground. Up until then, neither of us had held it long enough. We sat just outside the system, watching them with our long range sensors, plotting futile retaliation, struggling to keep out troops under control, and fuming. Mostly fuming. In fact, we were in an officer’s meeting griping when Lt Walsh called us to the bridge. The enemy was pulling out. Leaving. No thank you. No goodbye. No even a wave from one of their sticky tentacled hands. We were too stunned to speak for at least five minutes. We clustered around the view screens with our jaws dangling. It’s something to see thousands and thousands of ships just … leaving. Even the odd, bulbous Tarion craft. I felt a patriotic knot in my throat. (In retrospect, we’d had broccoli for dinner and broccoli tends to raise bubbles in my throat without glorious spectacles to cause them.) The admiral wanted to rush in a landing party in case they changed their minds (and probably to get the ground troops out of the ship before they started rioting) but we talked him into some caution. We scanned the planet thoroughly for traps, but found nothing. No nukes, no electronics, no ballistics. They left behind one barracks building that we picked apart from orbit, but it was even structurally sound. Normal procedure with first landing is a three month quarantine. Drop a small group of volunteers and watch them for three months while they check out the flora and fauna for unexpected dangers. I’ve watched a couple of quarantines that were better than soap operas and we had full bioscans to observe. Unfortunately, this protocols were composed on Earth where they didn’t have 200,000 Marines sent to fight a ground assault and then left on the ship for six years when the fight turned into a space battle. Jarheads generally have the IQ of rocks and more hormones than five average adolescent boys. They fight and rut in equal measure and if you can’t give them an enemy they’ll happily fight each other, or, even better, go after my crews. The admiral could barely control them when there was an enemy to fight, he couldn’t control them at all when the enemy just pulled out. So he suspended the quarantine and sent down the Marines. All of them. The corridors were nice and wide again, but just like kids, the ship crews started whining about not getting to go to the surface and the Admiral went over like a house of cards. That’s why, within a week after we took the planet, every member of the crew had been on the planet breathing the air and sampling the water, instead of the usual twelve member landing party. Rash? Yes, but at the time we didn’t think it would be a problem. ****************************************************** At the end of that first week, we all gathered on a flat plain on the Southern Continent to celebrate. We harvested the native flora that the medical crew deemed edible. Some of the enlisted had old fashioned acoustic instruments that they brought down from the ship. Harvey, one of my medical staff, taught dances to anyone who wanted to learn. She was a great dancer. She used to hold crew dances in the ship bay. Someone, in a fit of humor no doubt, lit a huge bonfire and convinced some of the enlisted to dance around it. They were flailing around like boneless scarecrows, stamping their feet and hooting, casting long shadows over the crowd. I was watching when my duty officer hailed me to report a serious illness sweeping the ship. The first man to symptoms, Staff Sergeant Lews, reported to the on duty medic who treated him for a chest cold. The medic gave him the standard vitamin booster and sent him to his quarters for bed rest. Four hours later his bunkmate found him. When the bunkmate jabbed his side to rouse him, his skin ruptured and his liquefied organs spilled everywhere. Three mates were dead, the remaining skeleton crew (skeleton crew, that’s rich) had the cough. The admiral slammed a quarantine on my ship the moment I opened my mouth (and long before he heard the details. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?) He also forbid me to speak of it when I asked to debark for what I felt (and still feel) was my duty. He claimed it was a spontaneous deadly virus mutation confined to my ship and that we couldn’t infect the other 900 plus ships of the fleet. I admit, it does happen sometimes. Remember the Dagunnar? Found drifting, the entire crew dead of a mutated virus. Or the T!nuk? Exploded because a grain parasite from the food stores got into the main computer and developed a taste for silicon. (I really should have known something was wrong then, he never explained himself. And he was really reaching with the T!nuk incident.) A moment later I heard him say the same thing to another captain. By the looks on some other captains’ faces, I wonder how many I didn’t hear. Poor Reilly looked like he’d just eaten a whole hydroponic lemon. I hailed the ship to tell my deck officer the decision. She had locked herself in my office and melted the door mechanism. Over the link, I could hear yelling outside the door. She wasn’t popular to begin with and I suppose my little message didn’t help any. I’m sorry. I should have done what Captain Christos did. She just left. She stole a shuttle and returned to her ship to go down with it. Or, in her case, plunge it into the sun. It was a pretty flair. The Admiral pretended not to be angry. The Admiral is a very bad actor. He made it a point to mingle. He shook hands, clapped backs, smiled. When he smiled, if you looked closely, he seemed to be in pain. Considering the stage of the illness he must have been in, he probably was in pain. The virus kills you one of two ways. There’s the merciful way where you start coughing and six hours later they pour you into a hole for burial. The other way is very slow. Some of the last medics thought certain people were better able to fight the virus and stay alive longer. And be in pain the entire time. The Admiral’s body fought the virus for three days. At dusk he gave a speech. All us captains (except Christos) stood beside him and listened to his propaganda. About what a wonderful thing we’d done for Earth and how we would be rewarded. As a senior captain I stood just to his left. In the middle of his speech he coughed. A long, heavy, hacking cough. He covered his mouth with the stupid embroidered handkerchief he always kept in his breast pocket. I noticed, as he put it away, that it had blood on it. ************************************************************* The Admiral didn’t die of the virus, he died of the outrage that came when the Marines found out they wouldn’t ever be leaving this planet. By that time I would call it a mercy killing. In the rioting that followed about a quarter of our party hied off into the wilderness, about twenty percent got themselves killed in violence, another ten percent did violence only to themselves. The rest started coughing. I’ll give the Marines this, they’re tough. They dug individual graves until there were too many bodies dead and not enough able to dig. There are about twelve of us left, waiting for the cough. We haven’t heard from any of the ships, but we can still see them in the sky when the setting sun glints off their hulls. The only medic left has suggested that we may have a natural immunity. The virus could only be 99.96% fatal. Leaving us alive, but carriers and trapped on this beautiful cemetery planet. Or, it could just be taking longer for us to show symptoms. In the meantime, I’ve been remembering my talks with Reilly about the Ancient American Frontier. (Reilly died early on in the rioting. Somebody shot him for trying to keep order.) Did you know that the cowboys didn’t kill the natives? Smallpox did. There was a smallpox outbreak on the Eastern Seaboard of what was then the United States. The army took blankets straight from the smallpox wards and gave them to the Natives. The Natives had no resistance to the virus and it killed huge numbers of them. I told one of the jarheads about this and he decided that this virus of ours was the Natives way of getting revenge. We gave them our virus and they waited 1000 years to give us theirs. He's got most of us referring to the virus as the Natives’ Revenge. I suppose it balances the books. The army gave them the infected blankets to steal their beautiful land and they lured us to their virus with a beautiful planet. It sure took them a long time, but they say revenge is a dish best served cold.

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