17:14, 22 June 4404
Mount Everest, Himalaya Ecological Conservation Zone, Earth
8,846m above sea level
Earth. Beautiful, wild Earth, blue and green and yellow and white and a bright oasis of noisy life against the void of space. For thousands of years, the home of humanity, the newest contender for the throne of the galaxy - that species’ birthplace, its ancestral root. And yet, these last centuries, nearly abandoned by humanity itself, cordoned off by a barrier of natural preservation rules, with human habitation permitted only in a few select regions, and that restricted to tourists and the exceptionally wealthy.
Earth, that familiar place, still so ingrained in the human soul that any habitable world is Earthlike, that blue skies and green grass are the model of a perfect view, yet now off limits and a planet many will never set foot on, only pausing to gaze out at it from a starship’s viewing gallery or from a structure in the glittering orbital halo that now circles the equator, bustling with all the culture and commerce that once filled the great cities on the surface below.
Earth, home of the species yet an alien world to so many, seat of power for the galaxy yet a distant concept for three-quarters of its subjects - perhaps none more than the Epechi Vacyyr Lanirvyki, standing at the summit of Mount Everest with her human boyfriend Jalli Petrsson, light-years from her own home and rebelling against all that Earth has come to mean.
Jalli stretched out his arms, as if trying to encompass the entire Himalayan vista that lay around them, from the snow beneath their feet to the great mountains looming in the distance. The golden evening sunlight glinted off his snow-goggles, pushed up on the top of his head, giving him the aura of some thermally insulated messenger from the gods.
“Think about it,” he shouted over the wind. “It’s times like these we need to stay together, not move apart. These rebels are trying to bring the system down - for what? It works! We need to hold it together, not break it down. Don’t go.”
Vacyyr tore the oxygen mask away from her face and tossed it aside. Frost crystals immediately began to form on her scaled cheeks, where the mask had let condensation build up.
“The system works, Jalli? For who? The guys who run it? You?”
She pulled her landing pass out of her jacket and threw it at him. The wind whipped it away before it had flown more than a few feet.
“Remember how hard it was for me to get down here? The customs guards wouldn’t let me through until you said I was with you, and even then I had to have a background check.”
Jalli turned to stare after the pass. He seemed vaguely shocked that she’d thrown it away, and his voice had lost its fire when he turned back to her.
“Now look what you’ve done. They’ll never let you back up without your pass.”
The tall Epechi shook her head. “I don’t need it. I came down here to say goodbye, Jalli. I was hoping we’d part on better terms, but either way this is the last we see of each other. There is no trip back up for me, not by the League elevator anyway.”
Something flashed in the sky above, somewhere to the east. The light reflected off the myriad mirrored surfaces of the orbital halo, scattering a shower of sparks down towards the dusky eastern horizon. They both turned at the same moment to look. A ripple of embers spread across the halo’s band, leaving darkness behind its fiery line.
There was a second flash, and they shielded their eyes. When Vacyyr lowered her hand, there was another hole burning itself into the halo. The wind shifted, and a deeper chill set in.
Jalli was still staring up at the halo. She moved quietly over to where her oxygen mask had fallen and picked it up, brushing off the light covering of snow that had come to rest on it. As she fastened it back in place over her face, a rumble echoed down from the sky, followed a few seconds later by another - sound finally catching up with the light. One by one, the mask’s cybersphere newsfeeds froze and blanked.
A third flash lit up the sky. It seemed to jar Jalli awake, and he spun to face her.
“What did you do?!” he shouted. His breath clouded in the air in front of him, like the breath of a dragon that wants you to think it can breathe fire but can only make smoke.
“Nothing,” Vacyyr replied. “But I knew it was coming. The rebels agreed to take me with them on their way out after the strike. That’s why we’re here - so they can pick me up.”
She finished fixing her mask into place and checking her thermal gear’s seals.
“I didn’t do anything today, Jalli, but soon I will. I’ll be out there fighting, for something I believe in, for myself and for everyone else who needs fighting for.”
Belated interceptors started to lift out of the Indian plains to the south, their booster engines etching silver needles of smoke into the air. Above them, new sparks began to catch the light - civilian starships scattering, warships scrambling into action.
A faint howl began to build, barely rising above the wind at first, then growing louder, closer, until Vacyyr’s teeth began to shiver in their sockets. Jalli looked around nervously.
“You…you called them here? Now? With me…the navy’s going to kill me!”
The Epechi lifted her arms in a slow shrug that seemed to shake a weight from her shoulders.
“You had your chance, Jalli,” she said. “You could have been a better man. Maybe now you’ll take the chance to be a faster man, and get off this mountain before the interceptors follow my ride in.”
Sonic booms rolled in from the south, delayed signatures of the still-climbing interceptors. Below the slowly fading pillars of rocket smoke, the long dark shade of a cruiser detached itself from the sprawling Dhaka shipyards and started to claw its way upwards.
Jalli took a half-hearted step towards Vacyyr. He looked like he was trying to be threatening, but the howl hung in the air and made it impossible to focus his anger. He shook his head to clear his ears, dusting snow everywhere, but the howl only grew louder. He opened his mouth to say something, and-
-another flash washed out the sky-
-a spear of light hurtled down from the heavens and pinned the cruiser to the ground-
-a grey ship shaped like an arrowhead rose on a roaring flame above the mountaintop, AG lifting the snow from the rocks to form cyclones in the air. Jalli staggered away in the backblast from the ship’s engines, and Vacyyr held up her arm against the fusion glare.
The ship’s aerovanes unfurled from its stealth-flat flanks, and it settled into a looming hover a few metres off the peak. The snowflakes in the air hissed and popped as they touched its hull, still hot from re-entry. Vacyyr hefted her bag and moved towards the ship. A hatch slid open beneath the nose, and shadowy figures in armour carapaces beckoned from the red-lit interior.
She looked over her shoulder. Jalli was gaping at the punctured warship over Dhaka, still skewered on a lance of ionized air, but now slowly sinking back towards the ground. Vacyyr debated whether to call to him, but only for a moment. She took a long stride into the hovering ship’s AG fields, and it took her in.
High above, one of the interceptors’ smoke trails began to curve around, and a second soon followed. After a moment, the grey ship twisted in place, pushed away from the mountaintop to balance on its main drive, then leapt upwards and away. The blast blew snow everywhere, covering Jalli in white and forcing him to his knees.
He stayed there, kneeling in the snow, as the sound of the ship’s engines faded into the distance. He stayed there as the sparks in the sky began to exchange flickers of light, and some began to fall burning towards the ground. He was still there when the interceptors screamed overhead ten minutes later, and he was still there when a gentle rain of metal dust and charred polymers started to fall on the mountain. When the ashes came in on the east wind. Ashes, and the coming of war.