Above the Withering Branches
They say the time to die is when you are at the top of the game
Her warmest memory was the Spring Saturday in the senior year, when she and John took the ancient Thursson-Yamati flying limousine for a spin, a battered relic of the once prosperous times for the colony’s mining towns, and encountered the night with lustre.
John had spent refurbishing the vehicle’s antigrav locomotioner and chassis for the better part of high school, ceaselessly bartering for second and third-hand used parts, ignoring most of the girls who were heat-seeking him on afterburners, content to hang out with the quiet crew.
When he messaged her after breakfast, asking whether she would join him on the first test drive in the aerial before they met up with the evening crowd of kids at the Crater Lake, her stuttering heart numbed her tongue. The breathless sentence of acceptance she succeeded in blurting out was by any standards an embarrassment for a learned young lady, but it didn’t matter a rat’s ass.
A date — he had finally asked her out on a date!
He floated just above the tree tops, settling perfectly in the centre of the desiccated lawn in the freshly red-painted antique. It gleamed merrily under a noon sun chased by a flock of high-riding, puffy white clouds celebrating a day of boundless possibilities.
John brought carmine-and-pale flowers for her mom, the expensive lab-grown stuff, and a can of tobacco infused with maple syrup for her father imported no less from the Empire’s home system. He sat down with her younger brothers and made them laugh and then asked her dad if he would consider letting her accompany him until midnight when he would return her promptly to the same esteemed household.
As if it matters, she had thought, her eyes casting lightning bolts at her parents, but she need not have worried. Mom was blushing, and Pops became engrossed in the details of John’s rebuild.
The flyer launched off with a slight cough and tremble, then levelled its flight northward towards the Thundering Hills and the Monument of the Last Navigator, across the yellow-brown fields dried out from a climate that turned sour in the previous few years.
Isolated farmhouses slid below aside the ashen dirt road from Maintown, clouds of dust billowing behind the odd ground-effect transport. She tried to grab the buffeting slipstream whose eddies played havoc with her carefully nurtured tresses. Still, she did not mind as she listened to John talking enthusiastically about going to study starship design and blueprinting his crackerjack optimisation for ZPE reactors that would enable longer jumps.
At the Monument, they walked through the remains of the one planet-fall blister that went off course, landing precariously on a wind-swept plateau with pygmy evergreen brush, and reclined on the warm concrete steps of the site cafeteria, eating double cones of ice cream. As the breeze picked up, he put his jacket around her shoulders and hugged her.
From then on, events blurred into a multihued collage of scenes: their trip back and an emergency alighting by a dried-out stream where she helped John open the propulsion casing and twiddle with the interiors, a shaky dash to Crater Lake where their friends greeted them with knowing winks amid the settling dusk, and their help with cranking up the obstinate campfire amid toasts of cheap lemonade-booze.
Before they crept back to the parked flyer among the huddled forms of teenagers, they lay beneath their new place for an endless hour, her head on his radiant chest. A withered pine tree above them obscured little of the ebony heavens whose spilt sugar of faraway suns she perceived in all their glory for the first time.
She whispered to him whether they would grow old together. He surprised her by answering that he would wait for her each year on that night’s date under the replica of the first aeroplane in history in a museum of the faint star system he pointed out to her aloft in the inkiness.
Half a year later, when high school was barely over, the Empire blockaded the Outer Colonies, and dreams of college decayed in the stark storms of Autumn, bringing famine and break-ups in communications.
Overnight, John’s family moved. Some claimed they drove to the hovels near the Spaceport, where father and son were to start working as war-time mechanics for the meagre Defence Forces; others said that the family escaped off-planet on one of the last passenger ships. Hoping it was the former, she tried to contact John at the Spaceport, but the Empire’s antimatter strike on its location several days later took care of that option.
After a week, a mercenary ship clandestinely descended to a field outside Maintown, broadcasting for several hours on terrestrial channels an invitation to all young, fit and bitter bodies who sought revenge on the Hegemony.
Leaving her ashen-faced parents and confused siblings at their house’s doorstep and the mercy of a bleak future, she rode her father’s electric bike to the touch-down location of the free company and enlisted within the hour.
In a decade, Major Dan-Ella has killed her way across half the Galactic Arm under the banner of a shitload of condottiere enterprises, her contract bartered for and resold a dozen times. Sipping coffee in a makeshift military canteen on a planet the Mining Corporations have marked for sterilisation, she muses on how fucking unbelievable it is she hasn’t yet been killed, and even not for want of trying, at that.
The anniversary is looming, and her thoughts unfailingly turn to that Spring Saturday, bitter-sweet scents of a dying yet beautiful evergreen invading her most guarded thoughts.
They say the time to die is when you are at the top of the game, or being a legend even, whispered about by dogs of war in all of Known Space.
She rises and walks past the other operatives into the sunlight of the landing pad — towards the parked fast-scout starship, the stolen activation codes shimmering in her mind. They would start hunting her immediately, of course, but she would reach the Museum of the Free Engineers’ Habitat at Proxima Geandrii with at least a standard day to spare.
Enough to meet what was left of John or his ghost.
This text was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2023 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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