Extinction (10 page)

Joker stood back, put a goofy, excited
look on his face and started up. “Wow! I can’t believe we’re marines! I can’t
wait for my first assignment. I put in for Earth but so did everyone else.” He
was making hand-shaking gestures towards Seth. “You didn’t put in for Earth,
did you? I mean, you’re a hero now. I won’t get it if you already asked for it.”
He almost fell over with laughter.

Seth remembered this guy now. At the
time, he thought that he was a tech officer or something and that’s why he
hadn’t seen him before. Specialty officers rarely did in-field mission training
because they would be in a command room somewhere kilometers away from the
battle. So Seth just figured he was some idiot without a family there either
and just wanted to talk to someone, anyone.

“Joker is the only one who could’ve been
able to hold on to your hand for that long without cracking up. The needle
needs to sit inside the target for a few seconds to get enough sedative into
the victim. Joker is good at that sort of thing.” Surgeon felt bad that they
had to break his nose and damage a kidney in the process. Luckily, modern
medicine was good enough to repair everything good as new.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Joker started. “You
got me back. I was the one you landed a punch on in your room. The sedative was
supposed to have you sleeping like a baby by the time we got there. That hit
broke my night visor and I had to get seven sutures in my cheek. Good job.”

Joker extended his hand. “Don’t worry,
it ain’t loaded this time.” The two warriors shook hands and Joker joined them
for lunch.

“I hear you’re coming along nicely. You
even beat this old-timer once in a while.” Joker poked a thumb towards Surgeon.

“Well, if I kicked his ass too much, he
might quit on us. And he’s not old enough for a pension so I really don’t want
to see him out on the street with nothing in his pockets.” Seth half expected a
physical retort to that, and when he didn’t receive one, he began to feel as
though he were becoming more a part of the group.

Surgeon and Joker had served together on
different missions and told old war stories to the young cadet in their midst.
Eventually, many of the other soldiers began to gather around and listen to the
stories and add some of their own. Seth was beginning to realize that he was
probably the only one in the group who hadn’t been on a real mission yet.

It made him feel better that he was with
seasoned veterans. It wouldn’t have been comforting to be on a mission with so
many unknowns and to have it run by other newbies such as himself. He was
enjoying the stories more than usual. Then he realized it was because they were
more real than the ones you hear in a bar. No one was trying to impress anyone
else and no one was trying to get the pretty girl in the corner to come home
with them. These were professionals passing information along to each other and
sharing experiences that could perhaps teach them all something new and keep
them alive the next time they were in battle.

Then Beast turned to Seth. “So, got any
good parade or color guard stories to share?” This was received with a boom of
laughter.

Because everyone had been a field operator
prior to this mission except Seth, they all had nicknames to fit their
abilities. Beast was, well, just that—a beast. He was a Shirka and damn proud
of it. Standing almost two and a half meters tall, he had hands that could wrap
themselves around your head completely before the steel-like talons pierced
your skull. Shirkas resembled a cross between a wolf and a Grizzly bear: tall
with a long snout that held the best scent detectors in any known sentient species.
Their eyes were just slightly farther back on their heads than a normal
predator’s usually are but were three times as sharp as a human’s. Although
they had fur that covered their entire body, they wore armored scent- and light-cancelling
uniforms that had become marine standard issue many years back.

Their natural whiskers had been lost due
to evolution but every hunter had his fur died black to resemble whiskers on
their snouts. When they opened their mouths, you could see the three rows of
teeth that were housed inside that huge maw. Every tooth was pointed and geared
towards a carnivorous diet. The triangular ears that sat in a forward position
on their head could be rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees in either
direction and moved independently of each other. If they didn’t smell you coming
from a kilometer away, they would almost surely hear you. It was almost
impossible to sneak up on one unless he was already dead.

They did have one flaw in their physical
make-up. It is believed that their overly acute senses brought in so much information
to the brain at such rapid rates that they burned out certain receptors.
Although a Shirka could physically live for an average life span of about one
hundred and ten years, their sight, hearing, and smell usually started to
deteriorate around age forty, in that order.

Luckily, the Shirkas have a great love
for their elders and only in times of great poverty or famine would the old
Shirkas be put to death in a highly revered ritual. All the senses didn’t
usually leave them completely until around age seventy, and most chose to die
during a ritual known as the “Final Hunt.” They would hunt the Romdil, which
was a very formidable beast, until they died. If they were successful on their
first hunt, they would go on another shortly after and continue this until they
lost. Most did not want to be a burden on their tribe and so they chose this
honorable way to leave the clan and continue on to the great hunt after death.

This Shirka that stood before Seth was
young and had no problem with his vision. He saw Seth becoming more and more
nervous as the conversation started to get nearer to his side of the group. So
he challenged Seth, as any good Shirka would, to engage in the conversation
with everyone else. He knew that Seth was green so he figured a little humiliation
would do him good.

Seth didn’t want to seem as though he
was bested by that comment so he began to retort when a resounding, “General on
deck!!” was heard throughout the mess hall.

Although military bearing and
formalities had been almost non-existent during this cruise, everyone’s
reflexes kicked in and there were thirty marines standing tall and as still as
rocks. A five-star general walked on deck and looked at everyone individually
with a stare that seemed to be filled with respect.

“You want to hear a story? I’ll tell you
a story about a young cadet who single-handedly beat a whole marine division
during war games. This cadet had been without food or water for two days and
managed to out-smart a division of marines who were combat veterans.” His stare
shifted to Seth. “I have the battle simulation on board and we will in fact be
reviewing it for a tactical strategies lesson that I will be holding tomorrow
at oh-eight hundred.”

All eyes turned towards Seth. They knew
he was the only newbie on board and the general’s timing must have been
deliberate. The fact that a five-star general was on board was impressive and a
bit foreboding. That rank was reserved for wartime and gave him complete and
utter control of any command group. He could walk right up to another general’s
battle group and say, “My command now”, and that would be that.

Seth recognized the general as the same
one who landed his shuttle at the end of the war games and took Seth into his
care, bestowing compliments of intelligence and such things on him. Seth felt
better knowing that this general was in command of the mission; something just
felt right about him. He knew that if anyone could pull it off, it would be
him.

“Now,” began the general in his deep
raspy voice, “are you men gonna sit around yammering like women in a
needlepoint club? Or are you gonna get back to training!”

Really more of an order than a question,
it was answered with a table shaking, “Aye, aye, sir!!” And with that, the mess
hall was evacuated in less time than it took to actually reply. Everyone
continued to their next training cycle and waited for their instructors to
catch up.

The general had apparently kept the
instructors behind and the mess hall was sealed for a briefing of sorts, Seth
imagined. Oh well, he thought, at least we’ll find something out tonight. And
with that, he headed for flight control. His next training evolution was in a
fighter cockpit.

The world was swirling around, maybe
even the entire universe was—he couldn't tell. Pulling away from him, sucking
him down a drain. The sensation was new—not only new, but a first. The first
sensation in his universe.

For the longest time, his perception of
the universe was that he was only a concept, a possibility, a potential for
existence not yet fully realized. He understood what it meant to be a physical
being, to have a body, to have a presence among other sentient beings; that had
all been taught to him so long ago in the beginning.

The tube, his personal universe, had
taught him those concepts along with so many others. He was aware that one day
his masters might call upon him to serve the empire, and if that happened, he
would transition from a possibility to a reality. Unless or until that day
came, he was content to roam his universe and observe it as only a concept
could.

Content
. Such an odd word to use
given what he was. His physical, not yet used or realized, form was in a tube
somewhere in the galaxy; so he could actually be defined as the kon-tent of the
tube. At the same time, he had no desire to be more than he already was so he
was kuhn-tent with his current place in the universe.
Content
. On more
than one level, it fit him.

But could he really be content with his
current state? Was it possible for something such as him to even have that
frame of mind either in this state of being or the next possible adaptation of
his design? Could his genetic programming even allow him to be content, at
ease, appeased, fulfilled, gratified, satisfied? If he thinks he's content and
can ponder the question of contentness, then the logical conclusion is that
yes, he can be content.

The next logical question then is,
should he be able to be content? He thinks probably not; something is wrong—not
quite right, but not wrong enough that his personal universe senses the
inconsistency and voids the tube, thereby ending his potential existence and
coldly breaking his physical form to its base nutrients to share those
nutrients with the other tubes around him. His brothers. His likeness. His self
but not self.

His self but not self. Another
interesting concept. Every single warrior in the empire was built from the
exact same genetic sequence and grown to within a tolerance of
0.000000000000001 variance. Anything outside that variance was broken down and
used as nutrients for other warriors who fit within the tolerance. And yet they
were different.

Nature versus nurture, a seemingly
galactic and maybe even universal concept with every sentient species. It's
logical to think that after the warriors were brought into existence and sent
to their various posts, they would change and become their own beings with each
life experience they encountered but that's not the case. Even though they are
the exact DNA replicas of one another, identical to an absurd power of ten, and
in their tubes they were taught the exact same thing in the exact same sequence
for the exact same times, they always emerge from their tubes with a slightly
different personality. They emerge as themselves and not as one another. Why?
It makes no sense.

Well, it kind of makes sense now, now
that things are different.
Before
. Another strange concept given the
circumstances; before the purge occurred, technicians would monitor the tubes
and turn the warriors off once all of the pre-emergent learning was done. The
warriors would not exist even in the conceptual way that he now existed.

But now things are different. Since the
purge, there was no one left to monitor the tubes the way they had been before.
The tubes were guarded by the elder warriors, who only had a few years of life
left in them. But guarding was all they did. No monitoring. No adjustments.
When the empire needed more warriors, they sent a remote command to the tubes
and the required amount of warriors were brought into existence. A ship came
and took them away.

Without the tubes being monitored, once
the training was complete, the warriors were left to themselves. Some shut down
mentally and waited. Some explored the knowledge contained in the databases of
each tube. Some went back through the lessons over and over again, focusing on
areas of personal interest. Some went crazy and subsequently turned to mush and
fed to everyone else. Some became too much of an individual and when the tube
sensed this, they were also turned to mush.