Sunshine on the Grass

Jessop leaned against the frame of a bay door, looking out over the place he called home. For as far as the eye could see, dappled shadows of broken sunlight formed ink-blot mosaics of light and dark across rustling golden grasses. It was mid-afternoon; though the sky was cloudless, the broken hulks of old space stations and ships, which had once been the center of government on Terra Poales Poaceae, drifted across the sky mottling the sunshine, bruising the scenery and making it, in a way, unrecognizable as it tarnished the golden grasses with formless shadow. Heaving off the door, Jessop turned away from the big empty world, and marched back into the barn. Caught in a thin sunbeam cast through one of the loft windows that seemed to leech colour from the scene, two men were taking turns, drinking and digging a deep hole.

On the left was a stocky man with a full face and even fuller eyebrows of chestnut brown. His skin was pocked and dirty in a way that Jessop was sure would never come clean naturally. He was a miner foreman by trade and dress, thick canvas coveralls over a light Kevlar shirt. He had a line etched into his forehead where the strap of his helmet sat almost constantly. This was Reed, and he was exactly the same as Jessop has known him to be for his entire life.

Across from Reed, another man with silvering hair rested a fine, now-ruined shoe on the flywheel of a buried vault door. His clothes were tradesman’s clothes, but professionally cleaned and well maintained, practically new except for the dirt that had stained them digging the pit he stood in. He was a high-ranking official in the hub town of Triticeae Province, which was one of the main distribution centers for wheat and sheep, often trading with Reed’s province, Leymus, far to the west; a more rugged place, whose hills and mountains gave up more of the wood and stone needed for construction. He took a deep swig from the bottle, and though his face was flush from the drink, it wasn’t enough to mask the pain in his eyes, knotting up the muscles under his skin. This was Camus, and he had been like a father to Jessop all his life, teaching him and the others how to be real people, sharing the things he’d learned from their old chief engineer, making sure they could tell right from wrong and learn to make their own decisions.

Jessop, for his part, was a ranchman engineer, sort of an all-purpose solution provider for the farmlands which stretched across this province. He fixed everything from equipment to animals, and even had a deft hand at surgery in a pinch, and helped train the other ranchmen in those skills. His clothes and boots were worn in a way that matched his face, and hung off of his perpetually skinny frame by a thick leather belt. No one who knew him could describe two different outfits he might own, but they all knew the rare old belt buckle, which he’d told others was a family heirloom, a burnished steel sigil of the Engineer’s Corps.

Together, the three of them held positions of power and influence on Poales, and used them to help steer the development of the colony against the threat they knew was coming. Every year, more of the debris from orbit would drift further into the atmosphere, and though the fall, shooting stars were particularly brilliant, the equipment up there had been designed to survive re-entry. They’d been doing this a long time, but up until recently, they hadn’t been three men alone.

Jessop stepped up to the edge of the pit, tipping his shovel up with the toe of his boot, and dropping heavily in next to the others, taking the bottle.

“I can’t believe it’s been thirty years.” Cam said, his voice cramped into an old man’s drawl, like he was afraid to pry his teeth fully apart when he spoke. It was, of course merely an affectation of the role he played, but its inherent charm made Jessop proud of his brother for achieving it. Reed grunted an answer, kicking the back of his shovel in wordless acknowledgement. Jessop set his drink down on the edge of the hole, cutting in to the dry dirt before chiming in.

“Twenty-eight, Cam. Don’t exaggerate for our benefit.” The other stiffened as Jessop pulled a few times to get a good load of dry dirt on his spade.

Cam let his shovel fall with a clank against the titanium vault door which was now mostly exposed at the bottom of the hole. Pulling himself up out of the pit and wiping dirty hands on what would be relatively expensive pants, the old man grabbed an edge of the sheet and pulled it off the body on the nearby slab, letting it pour onto the floor like a ghostly liquid.

The corpse was a mess of charred meat, plastics, wires, and ceramic stronger than steel. The artificial parts were far more plentiful than the flesh covering them, but they were not, Jessop found himself thinking, what had made this brother the man he was. This was Quentin, and he’d served, more than once, as their collective conscience. The broad lipped smile and dark skin, the soft, gentle, hazel-coloured eyes and wide white teeth of a face each would hold etched into memory until the last synapse burned out in their brains was nothing more than a garish rictus of broken electronics.

Quentin’s desecration had been post-humous, at least. By the time the mob had gotten to him, he was already beyond repair. He’d been the director of the power plant network built from the recovered fusion generators that fueled the settlements across the colonized world. A cascade failure, caused by the need to use ever-dwindling supplies for patchwork repairs, threatened to overload the entire local grid and blow out irreplicable pieces of their plant. Considering the impact that would have on their progress, Quentin had thrown himself physically into one of the transformers, unmooring it with his weight an enhanced strength. It had taken out power, for certain, but in a way they could recover from with the right ingenuity.

This was not how the people saw it, however. Emotionally, every man, woman, and child of Triticeae knew that one of the False-Men had sabotaged their reactor, and tried to kill them. No other reality mattered in the face of one of them stepping out of their cultural nightmares.

“Look how they massacred my boy.” Cam’s voice waivered as he spoke, his face screwed into a twisted mask of unchecked grief. His hands shook as he laid them on Quentin’s body, gently, tenderly tracing the places where the recognizable flesh of the dead man’s face gave way to the marks of brutal, savage assault.

The three men were silent for a long time, before Reed tapped Cam on the back of his boot with an unopened bottle, and they set back to work again with renewed purpose. They talked, reminiscing about the war, how they’d taken up their prime directive of supporting and protecting the colony as a back door out of having to murder them for the Company. They laughed, talking about how Cam had started out his career as a statesman, how Reed had rallied the digger unions, and how Jessop had helped cure a virus which would have killed all the terrestrial livestock, how Quentin had kept the lights on, how Tara had helped set order.

Tara….

Reed turned the wheel on the vault door. Deadbolts withdrew and vents to either side hissed as the vacuum lock frosted the metal gills. Jessop helped Reed lift the heavy metal door, letting the first light into the vault for almost—but not quite—thirty years, where it fell over a face that looked peaceful in its soft repose. As thin sunlight drifted through dirty windows over her closed eyelids, photoreceptors charged small capacitors, and they fluttered open, one at a time. Most of her was missing, both arms and everything from the waist down having been separated and stored in a reinforced chest at the base of the vault, to keep her from struggling with them. One of her pupils dilated vastly, while the other focused on Reed’s face, making him smile a sad, tight lipped grimace. Jessop hopped up out of the pit, and helped Cam to lift Quentin off his bier, struggling to bring him down to lay beside her.

For more than three hundred years, the five of them had been guiding humanity, shaping their energy and focus into stockpiling, reinforcing vaults, mapping out fresh aquifers, adapting to drills, exercises, and routines. In the wake of a war where the Company men had turned engineered False-Men like Jessop and the others against the colonists, the irony was that it had been Quentin who tricked the targeting computers into firing into the orbital platforms when, facing defeat from the numbers on the ground, the Governor had ordered an orbital bombardment. Now instead of having all died in a fiery rain of death, they merely had to endure a countdown as de-orbiting debris slowly found its way closer to their world.

Everything fell apart, in time.

This fact was how, and why, they had lost Tara. It may have taken centuries, but they wore down just like anyone else did. There was only so much they could do to maintain themselves, changing identities to keep people from noticing they weren’t dying off, but when parts and programming faded away, they hit their limits. For Tara, the Company’s old kill command started kicking in. It had taken almost three thousand dead colonists before her brothers had to make the horrific decision to put their sister on standby.

Tara….

“Hellhellhello, brothers,” came Tara’s voice from within the box. Her lips lacked motor control now, so it just projected from somewhere in the back of her throat.

“I think they hithithithit me with a mmmmortar. Did you kill the rest?” Her wide eye found Quentin, and some part of her must have recognized the scrap for what it was, and while half her face kept its beatific upbeat manic look, the wide-eyed left collapsed into anguish, streaming tears.

“We have to endendendend it pleasepleasepleaseplease—” her speech began to loop, and the muscles on her face to contort and overload.

Without answering, Cam, Jessop, and Reed arranged Quentin next to her. It took all they had to see her like this, and even Cam didn’t have the courage to actually speak to her. By the time they were done, Reed was wet with tears, and Jessop coughed trying to keep the emotions in check. None of them knew why, or how real they were, or how deep they ran in the programming, but there was no denying that they had these very real feelings. When everything was set in place, Reed jumped out of the hole, breathing heavily but not quite fleeing the barn, as Cam and Jessop worked to lift the vault door back in place. From under the closing door, Tara spoke again.

“Gggggoodnight brothersss. Comecomecomecome see me again sooooooooon.” As the shadow of the door passed over her face, her eyes dimmed, and the lids began to droop again. The last thing she said before the door closed again until the next one of them got caught out, or came apart at the seams, and they’d have to do this all over again as two was “I’ll take care of Quentin while he sleeps. Please don’t worry, we’ll wait for you, together.”

Jessop wondered if the despair he felt was guilt from leaving her behind or the blameless joy in her voice at seeing them again. The three brothers waited, saying nothing, and feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, together.

Because that’s what family does.