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Aetiee
By Marty Duffy
July 3, 2008
3.
"Did God help us win the war, grandpa?" I asked somewhat jokingly.
Grandfather immediately answered, "Oh I have no doubt, my boy."
"Why did he help us?"
Grandfather chuckled a bit and looked down at me with a slight grin.
"I've been wondering that myself for fifty years. He don't always make it obvious, you know."
We talked while we were eating juicy figs that we had picked from the trees along the trail. I let grandfather have the ones that had softer skin. They were orange-ish on the outside, and the flesh was a kind of mix between tan and purple. They smelled like woodsy leaves and sugar, and they tasted like the sunset.
The taste impressed upon the conversation. Something inexplicably sad like the setting sun was in grandfather's lowered shoulders, and I could tell by his concerned-looking focus on me that he saw the same sadness in me.
I said, "I wish the sun wasn't going down, grandpa. I like being up here with you."
He replied, "It isn't so bad here."
"I really was scared before. In the car."
"I know."
"Do you think we'll come up here again?"
"Of course!" And then he smiled broadly before adding, "You're very bright, you know."
I cocked my head a bit and said, "What do you mean?"
He playfully scratched my scruffy hair and made it even more of a mess. While I was giggling and trying to pat it down, he said, "I mean that you shine like Vega while others just barely twinkle at night!"
"Thank you grandpa," I said. But my manners were armor. I hid my face from him and stared at my half-eaten fig.
Grandfather said, "My boy, one man's sunset is another man's dawn. You know that?"
I shook my head no. "There'll never be a war again for me to fight in."
"What do you mean by that?" Grandfather said with a bit of outrage.
"You fought the Covenant… I just clean horses."
Grandfather knelt down to face me and gripped my shoulders tightly.
He said, "There was nothing good about that war, Billy. Nothing!"
"I saw your medal grandpa. I saw it in your box. You got to be a hero, you—"
He shook me angrily while saying, "It doesn't mean anything, Billy. It doesn't mean a damn thing!"
I could barely control the muscles in my cheeks and my throat dried up. I squeezed my eyes closed -- refusing to let grandfather see me water up, but my eyelids couldn't hold. I cried.
Grandfather closed his eyes too.
He said, "I'm sorry," under his breath, and I believed him.
"Why was it so bad, grandpa?" I asked between sniffs.
He sighed deep like the answer was lost in a labyrinth.
"First," he said, "There was Orpo. We had to wear big—big masks on our faces. They dropped chlorine, viruses, radiation… It wasn't a thirty second exotic battle like in the movies, my boy, it was my life every day and night. No sleeping! Your muscles burned, your eyes stung and you couldn't even take off the mask to scratch them. Your body was all screwed up without sleep with all these pains and stomach aches and cramps... Bodies were everywhere you looked. The oil fields burning up would jam up the mak... Oh, it was a horror... And this is just marching around, Billy, this isn't even when the fighting was going on."
"What happened in the fighting?"
"We lost and retreated in a snap. Ran to the oil fields for cover in the smoke where they couldn't track us."
"Whoa…" I said as restrained as I could manage. "What happened then?"
"They started glassing us. The plasma raining down looks slow and tumbling in the movies, but believe me, my boy, on the ground… It's like an earthquake is making the whole sky fall on you."
He pointed up the trail ahead and then pointed back down the way we'd just come, and said, "From there to there would've been vaporized just-like-that. It fell so fast you couldn't even see it -- the light would blind you and the heat would cook you."
And then he just stopped talking and walked back in the direction of the parking lot.
"Grandpa?" I asked. "Where're you going?"
"It's late."
"Grandpa, I don't want to go."
He turned, glanced at the sun, and then looked at me.
"The sun is setting, my boy."
"We have time, though."
"But not enough to figure out why God helped us win."
"It's not important, grandpa."
He raised an eyebrow and said, "Not important?" He looked around pointing at the trees and said, "What could be a more important question, my boy?"
I shrugged and gave him the same uncertain look as the one I had given the priest during my first confession when he'd asked me the question, "Do you believe God created the Covenant?"
I was tempted to ask grandfather the same question, but I didn't.
Instead, I walked to him and grabbed his hand. I led him in the other direction. He didn't resist.
We moved quicker along the trail than before. It was quite nearly a jog, in fact.
As he huffed along, he said, "They airlifted us from Orpo along the coast and brought us up here. A million troops, hundreds of tanks, and Longswords hidden under tarps."
The trail narrowed and we had to move single file between the branches. I squeezed Grandfather's hand behind me tighter than before.
"They buried a nuke up here to take some of them with us if we lost.
"The mortar tanks shelled us. Most of our tanks melted and some abandoned us. And then they sent in drop ships. They were swarming all over the sky -- picking us off -- and we thought we were cooked.
"But then the good news started when Hell-jumpers from Bay of Campeche joined us."
Grandfather chuckled warmly. I pulled him along faster.
"Their pods… A lot of them slammed into the drop ships… Cut right through them. Our poor guys bought it, but— but good for them."
And then grandfather stopped speaking as we rushed down the trail briskly and energetically. I knew I was pulling him fast so that we could see all of Aetiee, but I didn't know why it was so important to me for him to see it all. The purple twilight darkened precipitously, but it didn't matter to me. All that mattered was Aetiee. It sang to my feet.
#
40 years ago.
A hologram of a military Class-C artificial intelligence construct named Stukely wrapped itself in thick Moorish silks -- which were also holograms -- in a ridiculous display of annoyance and discomfort for Sgt. Thomas Fallon – his core handler – to notice.
The temper tantrum-prone AI who fancied himself a free-spirited, 17th Century English privateer was "uncomfortable" because dried oil on his hologram projector was distorting his "stage". When he knew Fallon was looking, he waved his arm through the air to demonstrate it being twisted and blurred out of existence in certain spots.
Fallon rolled his eyes and said, "Stukey, I can't clean you and protect you at the same time."
The AI said, "It's Stukely! And while you might receive merriment from neglecting your maintenance duties so that you may serve as my vanguard against an enemy that's 50 kilometers away, I assure you that General Nole will not!"
"Stuke-ly, give me a break. The Covies could be sneaking around in camo right outside that door. I even heard they had a stealth drop ship at SigmaOc..."
Fallon gave Stukely a sly smile, and then turned and started typing on a computer terminal built into his desk.
"Good grief, sir!" Stukely said indignantly. "How is typing on a primitive machine going to 'protect' me!"
"I'm just trying to find out what's going on out there," Fallon said.
"Oh? All you had to do was ask…"
Stukely winked out of view and a hologram of the Geneseo continent of Vega Noir faded onto his holo-projector -- albeit distorted in a couple of small spots. Fallon stood and walked to Stukely's projector as the view zoomed in on the Aetian valley region of the continent's southern coast.
Small beacons representing UNSC transponders blinked all along Aetiee –- an escarpment overlooking the valley. Purple blots representing believed Covenant positions dominated the valley.
"So who's winning?" Fallon asked.
Stukely said, "Well, in orbit—"
"You think I don't know whose winning in orbit? What? is that supposed to be a joke?"
"Indeed, we are defeated in orbit once more, Sergeant, but Covenant casualties were quite significant, I assure you. The Campeche Bay even managed to survive long enough to drop nearly 500 Human Entry Vehicles to reinforce us!"
Fallon shook his head and said, "That's stupid. We could have gotten all those guys down here if they'd just stuffed them into Pelicans."
"Drop ships would have been able to ferry more reinforcements, but the HEVs will surprise the enemy! Surprise is what wins, good Sergeant! There were only 4,000 Italian mercenaries at Alcazar, but their betrayal surprised so many, that—"
"Don't start with your sword-and-sandal war nonsense, Stukey…"
"Sergeant, your ignorance of history never ceases to amaze! I assure you that cannon roared at Alcazar and not arrows. I should rather know, after all… Poor Stukely was decapitated by a Moroccan cannon, which—"
"How about: instead of talking to me about this nonsense, you keep your head in the battle and where it should be?"
Stukely violently flung his cape behind him and raised his nose high into the air, and said, "How dare you! I am coordinating guidance data for a five-thousand ton warship in high orbit, linking targeting data for ten divisions, navigating a hundred corps of tanks, and piloting a dozen reconnaissance flights right at this moment, and all while calculating and adjusting landing coordinates for the HEVs at temperatures of—"
A momentarily panic shocked the AI's holographic body like a heart attack.
"Stukely? You okay?"
"The HEVs have been destroyed," Stukely said. "The General has ordered all forces to retreat from Aetiee immediately. Please secure my processing core and bring me to the corvette, Sergeant; I believe we will be evacuating this world presently."
#
When the sun finally set and we returned to the parking lot, grandfather said, "You want to know what the real story is, my boy?"
"What?"
"The real story is that in '44 Your father was born, and your grandmother and I loved each other so damn much it makes me wish that I—wish that I never made it through Aetiee."
"Grandpa, don't say that."
Grandfather's eyes were watering. I had never seen him cry before. I had no idea what to say or do. And so I hugged him and prayed for him to feel ok.
He sobbed a little when he felt me touch him.
"She was so beautiful, my boy, and sweeter than white clouds."
We held each other close in the parking lot on Aetiee. And even though night-time was upon us, I had a feeling we wouldn't be going home yet.
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