Terran Preamble, Volume One
The nights when they forgot that you were out there were always the best, laying on the soft green plants and watching the sky with awe and wonder until Mother, or sometimes old limping Pappy came out to get you with a jestful scold and a reminder that dinner was long since chilled. Tonight was a night like that- but wonderful things were happening that your young mind couldn't comprehend- stars just kept winking into space that wern't there before! Great clouds of meteors light up the sky at random intervals, so bright that their decaying pink glows lit up the towers and processors on the land around your family's small farming compound. And, to top that, Mother had totally forgotten you were out there! Nothing beats this, you thought, a last one as sleep slowly overtook consciousness, dreams of space and those bright pictures of ships from magazines and the video dancing in your young head.
Waking with a start. Something is wrong... Someone is screaming from the house for you... Thunder..? Sitting up in the fields of moss, a dim pink glow emulsifying almost the air around you as you stretch your arms, yawns: Looking up. Eyes wide.
Someone roughly grabs your arm- Pappy, his old, wrinkled skin stretched tight over bones and muscles that you didn't know could still exert such force, moving with a panicked speed back to the farm- and you're roughly jerked from the ground, moss stringing from your long brown hair and coating the back of your white dress (Mother will be terribly upset...) but your eyes are still glued, wide as saucers to that thing just sitting there in the sky like a great posterboard cutout.
The thing, in your frenzied recollections during the flight to the Big City, underground to the shelters, had loomed like a great tower overhead that had been suspended midair halfway to the ground after collapsing. It was big- you'd seen a few ships in your short life of seven and a half standard years and you thought that they'd been big. Once you'd seen a Sho're freighter, loaded with machines and computers you'd guessed, land at a factory opening. It had dwarfed the factory that it was supplying, but this thing you'd just seen had dwarfed the sky, the clouds, the whole of your seven and a half year old world. Parts of the underside of it seemed to glow a dull orange ("musta' jus dropp'd down from Orbit," you'd heard someone in the shelters say, leaving you wondering where Orbit was,) and parts of it looked like they were on fire but they wern't- there were no words in your vocabulary to describe what you saw. It had three towers sticking out of it- one straight down, and two half-vertical, and there were scintillating blue clouds around the tips of them, which were the black of the half-burnt wood in the barbecue on Recovery Day. The front of that ship was divided in two, like a pair of hands held centimeters apart, and the space between them was that same towerine black, with little bolts of blue lightning shooting back and forth between those great hands.
You didn't even protest the rough, shambling path Pappy took to the transport car. Your eyes were too busy looking at this thing that looked for the world like a great cardboard cutout in the sky. Someone suddenly cheered- Jhonny, you think- and you looked up and saw familiar ships. Fast, agile ships painted the green-and-gold of the Homeworld, a dozen of them or more, red flame shooting from their engines as they sped by, almost breaking the sound barrier (we'll be doing that in a couple of years, you'd read in a paper). But somehow you thought that this was bad, despite the fact that everyone else in the car was clapping and shouting advance cheers of encouragement to the pilots. They flew in together- in 'formation', right towards the middle of the thing, like they were going to fly right between those hands and spread them apart, but you moaned, "no..."
Somehow, you knew what was going to happen...
A small sound started, deep in your lungs as your family and friends cheered the pilots on, the car now stopped on the road. The ships were about a couple of kilometers away from the thing by now and had opened up with cannon fire. That sound was loud in and of itself, but apparently you were the only one who heard-or felt- a low rumble, like the afterthought of thunder. The ships sped by and you see the familiar planet with a rocketing ship flying 'round it logo, that old one that your cousin Elizabeth had painted on her ship.
"It means Discovery," she'd explained to you a few years ago. An ancient symbol, apparently. Somehow that memory was suddenly not a good one.
The ships, green-and-gold a blur, were about a kilometer and a half from the thing now. The clouds of light around the towers on the thing had deepened in color, and little bolts of lightning splayed off from them, making paths around the ship that struck an ominous chord of terror in your heart, like a half-remembered nightmare from childhood that now seemed so far ago in the past. A gurgling cry was beginning to issue forth from your throat as the cannon impacts from the green-and-golds hit home, peppering the front of That Thing and coughing up great clouds of acrid black smoke. Your family cheered so loud that they didn't hear you, Pappy didn't notice your little nails ripping the fabric of his old shirt.
One kilometer. A thick, organic rumble permeated the air, the ground, you. Leaves were dropping from a nearby tree and your family had become silent, they too know now that something is horribly wrong. The smoke from the impacted cannon fire of the green-and-golds was lit from within by a sick blue light, causing the smoke to bubble and glow as if aflame itself. You are screaming now, a silent scream that noone will ever hear. One green-and-gold ship has pulled up, apparently going after an opportune target somewhere else on the ship. Jhonny's pointing...
It's too late for the other dozen or so green-and-golds to pull out now as certainly they all notice an explosion- a path like boiled water stretches from some unidentifiable point in the smoke cloud the ordinance left to where an expanding fireball of pure white light marks where a brave pilot and her ship once flew. The sound is pulsating now, both too low and too high to be heard by man, but loud enough to make everything else inaudible. Someone jumps from the car and starts to run, but you can't stop looking.
With no warning, the ordinanced cloud instantly evaporates and the front of that ship is encased with an unholy blue glow, like someone had turned up the sky too much, and you can feel your own hands spread and separate as the front of that ship does, like the old door in the back of the house that squeaks- one green-and-gold is right in between them. Encased in a radiance that hurts to look at as if it was bright, but really it is dim enough that it isn't casting any shadows that you can see, the whole front of the ship splays obscenely and instantly- you've never even thought of fast like this- the world is on fire.
Powerful winds hurtle the car off the road. Jhonny screams and then it is cut short, but there's no time for that now. You could barely hear him anyway. A column of pulsating light is where those green-and-golds used to be, stretching off into infinity, the wind blowing by so fast that your cheeks are cut open by flying leaves and grass, and then it's gone and your eyes take a minute to adjust.
You never stopped looking.
It never stopped being there.
A while later a rushing car passes, almost splattering you into the road but stopping in the nick of time. People swarm out, try to help Pappy up but he says something to one of them and they give him a big thermos and go on to Mother, helping her up into the large transport as is hovers nearby. Someone throws their long coat- Naval, from the looks of it- onto some shape on the ground and comes and takes you into the transport.
"Don't look at it," a voice whispers into your ear as you're hugged to a chest, insignia and badges poking you but that doesn't seem to hurt now. You're almost in the transport and you'll stop seeing in a minute, but you take a last good look at the Thing.
"I can't," your reply, and the man looks at you with the greatest sadness....
The nights when they forgot that you were out there were always the best, laying on the soft green plants and watching the sky with awe and wonder until Mother, or sometimes old limping Pappy came out to get you with a jestful scold and a reminder that dinner was long since chilled. Tonight was a night like that- but wonderful things were happening that your young mind couldn't comprehend- stars just kept winking into space that wern't there before! Great clouds of meteors light up the sky at random intervals, so bright that their decaying pink glows lit up the towers and processors on the land around your family's small farming compound. And, to top that, Mother had totally forgotten you were out there! Nothing beats this, you thought, a last one as sleep slowly overtook consciousness, dreams of space and those bright pictures of ships from magazines and the video dancing in your young head.
Waking with a start. Something is wrong... Someone is screaming from the house for you... Thunder..? Sitting up in the fields of moss, a dim pink glow emulsifying almost the air around you as you stretch your arms, yawns: Looking up. Eyes wide.
Someone roughly grabs your arm- Pappy, his old, wrinkled skin stretched tight over bones and muscles that you didn't know could still exert such force, moving with a panicked speed back to the farm- and you're roughly jerked from the ground, moss stringing from your long brown hair and coating the back of your white dress (Mother will be terribly upset...) but your eyes are still glued, wide as saucers to that thing just sitting there in the sky like a great posterboard cutout.
The thing, in your frenzied recollections during the flight to the Big City, underground to the shelters, had loomed like a great tower overhead that had been suspended midair halfway to the ground after collapsing. It was big- you'd seen a few ships in your short life of seven and a half standard years and you thought that they'd been big. Once you'd seen a Sho're freighter, loaded with machines and computers you'd guessed, land at a factory opening. It had dwarfed the factory that it was supplying, but this thing you'd just seen had dwarfed the sky, the clouds, the whole of your seven and a half year old world. Parts of the underside of it seemed to glow a dull orange ("musta' jus dropp'd down from Orbit," you'd heard someone in the shelters say, leaving you wondering where Orbit was,) and parts of it looked like they were on fire but they wern't- there were no words in your vocabulary to describe what you saw. It had three towers sticking out of it- one straight down, and two half-vertical, and there were scintillating blue clouds around the tips of them, which were the black of the half-burnt wood in the barbecue on Recovery Day. The front of that ship was divided in two, like a pair of hands held centimeters apart, and the space between them was that same towerine black, with little bolts of blue lightning shooting back and forth between those great hands.
You didn't even protest the rough, shambling path Pappy took to the transport car. Your eyes were too busy looking at this thing that looked for the world like a great cardboard cutout in the sky. Someone suddenly cheered- Jhonny, you think- and you looked up and saw familiar ships. Fast, agile ships painted the green-and-gold of the Homeworld, a dozen of them or more, red flame shooting from their engines as they sped by, almost breaking the sound barrier (we'll be doing that in a couple of years, you'd read in a paper). But somehow you thought that this was bad, despite the fact that everyone else in the car was clapping and shouting advance cheers of encouragement to the pilots. They flew in together- in 'formation', right towards the middle of the thing, like they were going to fly right between those hands and spread them apart, but you moaned, "no..."
Somehow, you knew what was going to happen...
A small sound started, deep in your lungs as your family and friends cheered the pilots on, the car now stopped on the road. The ships were about a couple of kilometers away from the thing by now and had opened up with cannon fire. That sound was loud in and of itself, but apparently you were the only one who heard-or felt- a low rumble, like the afterthought of thunder. The ships sped by and you see the familiar planet with a rocketing ship flying 'round it logo, that old one that your cousin Elizabeth had painted on her ship.
"It means Discovery," she'd explained to you a few years ago. An ancient symbol, apparently. Somehow that memory was suddenly not a good one.
The ships, green-and-gold a blur, were about a kilometer and a half from the thing now. The clouds of light around the towers on the thing had deepened in color, and little bolts of lightning splayed off from them, making paths around the ship that struck an ominous chord of terror in your heart, like a half-remembered nightmare from childhood that now seemed so far ago in the past. A gurgling cry was beginning to issue forth from your throat as the cannon impacts from the green-and-golds hit home, peppering the front of That Thing and coughing up great clouds of acrid black smoke. Your family cheered so loud that they didn't hear you, Pappy didn't notice your little nails ripping the fabric of his old shirt.
One kilometer. A thick, organic rumble permeated the air, the ground, you. Leaves were dropping from a nearby tree and your family had become silent, they too know now that something is horribly wrong. The smoke from the impacted cannon fire of the green-and-golds was lit from within by a sick blue light, causing the smoke to bubble and glow as if aflame itself. You are screaming now, a silent scream that noone will ever hear. One green-and-gold ship has pulled up, apparently going after an opportune target somewhere else on the ship. Jhonny's pointing...
It's too late for the other dozen or so green-and-golds to pull out now as certainly they all notice an explosion- a path like boiled water stretches from some unidentifiable point in the smoke cloud the ordinance left to where an expanding fireball of pure white light marks where a brave pilot and her ship once flew. The sound is pulsating now, both too low and too high to be heard by man, but loud enough to make everything else inaudible. Someone jumps from the car and starts to run, but you can't stop looking.
With no warning, the ordinanced cloud instantly evaporates and the front of that ship is encased with an unholy blue glow, like someone had turned up the sky too much, and you can feel your own hands spread and separate as the front of that ship does, like the old door in the back of the house that squeaks- one green-and-gold is right in between them. Encased in a radiance that hurts to look at as if it was bright, but really it is dim enough that it isn't casting any shadows that you can see, the whole front of the ship splays obscenely and instantly- you've never even thought of fast like this- the world is on fire.
Powerful winds hurtle the car off the road. Jhonny screams and then it is cut short, but there's no time for that now. You could barely hear him anyway. A column of pulsating light is where those green-and-golds used to be, stretching off into infinity, the wind blowing by so fast that your cheeks are cut open by flying leaves and grass, and then it's gone and your eyes take a minute to adjust.
You never stopped looking.
It never stopped being there.
A while later a rushing car passes, almost splattering you into the road but stopping in the nick of time. People swarm out, try to help Pappy up but he says something to one of them and they give him a big thermos and go on to Mother, helping her up into the large transport as is hovers nearby. Someone throws their long coat- Naval, from the looks of it- onto some shape on the ground and comes and takes you into the transport.
"Don't look at it," a voice whispers into your ear as you're hugged to a chest, insignia and badges poking you but that doesn't seem to hurt now. You're almost in the transport and you'll stop seeing in a minute, but you take a last good look at the Thing.
"I can't," your reply, and the man looks at you with the greatest sadness....