Dies to Removal

The Taking of Yuthun

Chapter 1: Landing

Lahra gripped the side of the narrow shower stall and braced herself. The Juggernaut was an Alpha-class war frigate, designed for quick combat maneuvers and maximum firepower; it left more than a little to be desired when it came to creature comforts, however. The captain had explained to her the first night she came on board that it was more than just a cost-cutting measure, or had at least given her the layperson's version of it: pressurized water, he said, was both a force of inertia when it was at rest and a force of momentum when it was moving, both of which screwed royally with the steerage of a ship the size of
the Juggernaut; but that was nothing, he told her, compared to the danger it posed in case of a hull breach. “Back when I was on an M-class,” he had told her without going into any sort of detail what an 'M-class' might be, although she figured it was short for 'merchant,' “a piece of debris hit the ship, making a puncture about the size of a pinhole in the water tank. The water, in contact with the vacuum of space, instantly froze, so not only did they start spiraling out from the pressure, the ice crystals started spraying into the forward cabin; the whole bridge crew was shredded in a matter of seconds, their bodies liquified and plastered, literally plastered, to the ceiling by the centrifugal force created by the spin of the ship.
“So yeah,” he said, his face darkening to a mask, “sorry our showers suck, but it's for your own protection.” Ever the sly journalist, Lahra concluded that he got this question a lot: they'd been discussing the meal plan
for the journey up until that point. Unfortunately, her theory had been incorrect; after her first time using the synthetic gravity shower, she learned that he'd felt behooved to tell her about it because the showers just sucked that bad.
The showers operated on two known principles. One, that like elements attracted to each other; a water molecule would naturally gravitate towards other water molecules. Two, that a human was generally capable of holding their breath for at least thirty seconds without too much harm to the circulatory system. The first 'wave,' as Lahra had come to call it, wasn't that bad. The water sort of half-misted and half-oozed out of hundreds of miniature shower heads, and as long as you were careful to stand in the exact center of the showering cubical so each droplet had a chance to warm up in the man-made atmosphere it was kind of soothing, like being caught in a sudden summer downpour back on Earth. The second, heavier wave was more... erratic, as each
shower head spun and shook and jiggled to cause a fake pressure by just flinging water willy-nilly towards your naked body, but that was a walk in the park compared to third and final wave, which she could only bring herself to think of as the “pumping” phase as it sprayed her with water now close to searing thanks to the heat sinks built into the showering mechanisms as each tiny head racheted noisily in the echoing cubicle.
The next day she had decided to ask the captain again about it. “Does it have to be so...” she started before pausing to try to find the words.
“...much like standing in the middle of a circle jerk?” He concluded for her. “I'm afraid so.”
“Couldn't they at least make the stall big enough so that you didn't have to hold your arms above your head? That's the worst part, like you're tied up or something.”
The captain blinked. “I always thought that was the only good part,” he said, blushing.
After that, the two of them didn't speak much.

Lahra
stepped out of the shower and gave her arms a good shake to get the blood circulating in them again while simultaneously trying to shake the thoughts out of her brain. Every time she took one of those damned showers, she felt like she was on display, naked and being watched.
She reached for a towel, and noticed that she was naked and being watched. One of the ship's personnel, a private by the bars on his fatigues, stood directly in the middle of her single room, looking stonily forward as she quickly grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself. The towel, of course, was not designed for this but rather for the efficient removal of excess skin moisture, so using it to cover herself was something like trying to wrap a wet cotton ball around an hourglass. “Don't you knock?” she asked haughtily as she reached for towel number two, which she would discover wasn't much good for anything except sticking wetly to towel number one.
The private blinked slowly. “Ma'am,” he said,
simultaneously trying to keep his eyes fixed on an invisible mote on the far side of the room while also trying to keep the smirk off his face and failing at both, “your door is made of two feet of pure stainless steel. When this room isn't being to used to transport visiting dignitaries or members of the press, we pack it full of dry goods and let it depressurize. I did not knock, no.”
“Oh,” Lahra said, sidestepping behind the only chair tall enough for her to crouch behind, “well try next time anyway. And can you please turn around?”
“No ma'am I cannot,” he responded snappily, “I am under strict order to keep you fully in sight until I've escorted you to the bridge.”
Lahra grimaced. “Wasn't the Juggernaut involved in a high-profile case last month where they violated a direct command from the Earth Naval Council and several treaties just to chase down one enemy speeder and blow it to pieces?”
“Yes ma'am,” the private said.
“And were you a member of the ship's crew at
that time?” She continued, reaching again for the nearest blouse draped across the back of her bed.
“Yes ma'am. I was the gunner, ma'am.” He said.
“And now you follow your orders to the letter?” She finally grabbed the blouse and pulled it on as quickly as she could.
“All the more reason not to tempt fate,” the private said.
She nodded sardonically. “That figures,” she said. “Come on, let's go.”
“You'll want your badge, ma'am,” the officer replied, “and perhaps some pants.”

Two years ago, when Lahra had first entered the Universal Academy of the Press, she learned that there were essentially three directions her chosen vocation could go: she was given a choice to take part either in the six year, four week, or three day program. Only after she'd decided to take the path of moderation and signed up for the four-week course did she learn what those different courses meant: it took six years to learn how to be the person in front of the
camera; it took four weeks to learn how to operate the camera; and it took three days and two surgeries to become the camera. After her courses were finished and she'd been assigned to a team did she truly understand how well she'd dodged a bullet, although it would be more accurate perhaps to say 'dodged a bullet being shot from a pistol being held by a person being shot from a cannon mounted on a medium-sized planetoid hurtling towards her location at half the speed of light.'
The other two members of this mission's press junket were living, breathing proof of her good luck. The “three day degree” was represented this time by a young man named Samill who had long, uncombed hair, piercing eyes that always seemed to be open as wide as possible, and who made buzzing noises whenever he tilted his head a certain way that probably went a long way towards explaining the eye thing. The optic implants he'd had installed ran entirely off his own heat and
recorded everything he looked at. Lahra, who had the job of editing his daily footage, was thankful for the neural restabilizers the surgeons had put in at the same time as the rest of his cybernetics, otherwise, as she knew all too well, almost all of the footage would be of the bosoms of herself and any other females in the vicinity at the time of the taping, even if, say, space gorillas were trying to rip their way through the hull of the ship. That had been a fun day.
Her other coworker, representing the “six year path,” was Liza. Off-camera, Liza was a generally kind person who was surprisingly philosophically grounded and could carry a conversation on most subjects, even abhorrently complex subjects, quite well. As soon as Samill was looking at her, however, literally as soon as his eyes so much as darted in her direction, Liza became so vapid and talkative that it bordered on psychopathy, able to rattle off a string of tearjerking bullshit with a gleam in her eye, a cock
of her hip, and a taut smile on her lips regardless of whether she was talking about the noodles the cafeteria was serving for the third day in a row or the anthropomastication methods employed by space gorillas as they chewed their way through the Juggernaut's crewmembers. The most disturbing part of it from Lahra's viewpoint was that her act was so effectively hypnotizing that Lahra often had to cut the filming short just so that nearby personnel wouldn't stop and listen to her report instead of dealing with the crisis she was, in fact, reporting on.
Meanwhile the sum total of Lahra's post-graduate education could be summed up easily enough with the command “if you need to know how to do something, ask the computer” followed with rote memorization of how many seconds each piece could be: stories that involved food or the weather, for instance, could be up to six minutes and forty-one seconds, whereas stories about the various wars the Earth Naval Command were
involved in could only be sixteen seconds long unless they included someone firing a gun, in which case they could be twenty-one seconds long, plus three seconds if people were shirtless. Lahra devoted her spare time to contemplating scenarios that would allow her the maximum amount of screen time she herself could get; so far, she'd figured out that she might be able to get most of a minute on the network if she were standing in a snowy field shooting at a robot while twirling seductively on a pole that would be there for no good reason. She figured she might have come up with a slightly better time frame if it hadn't been for the coming of the living hell that was the synthetic gravity shower. She'd always done her best thinking in the shower, and in a way she still did, but not with any thoughts anyone would label as 'productive.' A more fitting description would be 'a sort of alien rage at the futility of the pursuit of human privacy.'
Lahra met up with the rest of her
team outside the bridge door. Liza, as always, was wearing the sleek pressed press suit that nobody Lahra had talked to had ever seen her not wearing; Samill was wearing a flak jacket and a body suit designed for maximum mobility; Lahra was wearing a silk blouse and footy pajama bottoms... which, despite all evidence to the contrary, didn't make her feel out of place at all; it was her job, as editor, to wear something totally inappropriately mismatched. The three nodded to each other but didn't say anything. Judging from the looks on their faces, not one of them knew what was going on.
The door to the bridge opened. “Ah!” exclaimed the captain from where he was standing in front of a large viewscreen. “The press is finally here. I thought you might like to see this.” With this, he swept his hand aside in a gesture that instantly summoned the image of a game show host in Lahra's mind, but she had to admit for all the grandiose posturing he did certainly have something impressive to show
them.

Almost two weeks ago to the day, Lahra had received her latest orders: she was to travel, via military transport, to a rather smallish planet about six million miles from the “outer edge” of known space. The Outer Edge was definitely a misnomer, especially these days; it wasn't like space just ended there, if that were even possible; rather, the area became... difficult to navigate, thanks to a blend of gravitational histrionics and unknown qualities inherent to it. More to the point, propulsion stopped, well, stopped working to push your ship forward, and would instead propel you in a different direction. Most often, firing the thrusters of your ship would cause it to either turn up, left, right, down, or some combination of those directions, and head in that way; barring that, it would most likely otherwise simply slide, crablike, in one of those directions; but what really kept people from trying to explore the area were those few cases where the thrusters pulled the ship
backwards on itself. Considering that the only ships capable of making it that far out into the depths of space in a timely manner were those equipped with the most modern thrusters available, and these thrusters fired a tachyon-based stream of phase-bent particles off of a core that burned at millions of degrees, reversing was generally what most would call a very bad time, especially when the temporal spacial dynamics of the engine meant that the front of the ship would meet up with the back of the ship before the back of the ship had begun moving. One admiral, upon surveying the wreckage of one of the earliest pioneers of the Outer Edge, was infamously quoted as saying “My God. It's like they went back in time and killed themselves,” which, as it so happens, is about as spot on an assessment of the situation as possible until the human brain finds a way to conjugate the phrase “existing simultaneously at all points on your own life timeline as well as all possible outcomes of your
alternate timelines including the ones where you don't exist as well as the ones where you travel back in time and alter your own timeline into paradoxes so you can't possibly exist and that all might make enough sense to internalize except there's always a damn bear wearing a tiny hat and a polka-dot tie in each and every one.”
Generally, a very bad time.
Thus it was that the Outer Edge of known space was, by and large, allowed to be ignored, and its dimensions were more a curiosity for astronomers than anything else, as was the resulting sub-discussion of whether dimensions was the right word for such a boundary. Humanity went on with what it had been doing previously, often while drinking heavily, but ever since its discovery the Outer Edge created a bizarre sort of claustrophobia to the more adventurous souls taken with wanderlust, in much the same way a Do Not Feed the Birds sign will call upon instincts in the brain far more primitive than simple reading
comprehension to reach for whatever edible foodstuffs you might have on you to toss in the aforementioned bird's direction. Seven years before Lahra and the others took their flight aboard the Juggernaut, one such pioneer by the name of Captain Allen Gorus took it upon himself to finally crack the code of entrance to the forbidden kingdom beyond the Outer Edge, and through some indiscernible stroke of luck managed to make it a full two miles past the until-then-unbroachable perimeter of the Outer Edge. According to interviews with Captain Gorus, his crew, and the recorded logs of his journey, he did so by employing a navigational stratagem later made famous as the “Fuck it. Let's do this!” maneuver, which involved using split-timing decisions based on gut instinct and, for some reason, pretending he was an overly amorous ferret. Nobody, obviously including Captain Gorus, his crew, and the recorded logs, knows exactly why any of this worked, but the results of their
sojourn “two miles through” proved fruitful: upon returning to what those of us not blessed with intellect call “normality," each member of the crew found their lives improved in some way. Captain Gorus, for example, returned to Earth to find that he was, without reason, younger and healthier than when he began his journey, and that his wife had been replaced with a younger, smarter, and more attractive version of the same woman; several crew members checked their fiscal balance to find they had become independently wealthy, while others discovered that long-dead loved relatives, lovers, or even pets had been returned to life. One particularly lucky man working in engineering achieved transcendence, while the man who worked beside him got a call not half an hour after their return from the woman who had broken off their engagement thirteen years previously, except she hadn't and instead they were happily married. About the least miraculous outcome of their journey was
one of the women on the janitorial staff, who not only was no longer on the janitorial staff but also in a lesbian relationship with a really, really hot girl and everyone was totally cool with it. The crew, having realized what must have happened, soon gathered all the available evidence and came to the undisputed conclusion that whatever it was they desired most in the world had come true.
Of course, because reality is nothing if not a perverse son of a bitch, it took them a great while to even convince anyone else of their findings. After all, from an outside, objective perspective, those miraculous things they said had happened to them had, in all quantifiable ways, already happened to those not affected by the wish-granting powers of the Outer Edge or whatever it was that had lain beyond. Captain Gorus himself spent the next week and a half after his return from the taxing journey sleeping on the couch of his estate for exclaiming to his, to him, suddenly beautiful wife “What happened, you're
not hideous!?” and the man who found his true love hadn't dumped him was met with a slap of cold irony when he couldn't stop talking about how lucky he suddenly was and got dumped. Those who found themselves with great monetary wealth continued to spend it like they were poor, or were often stuck when, in the turn of conversation, one of their friends would ask them why they had decided to skip the life of the elite in favor of being a simple crew member set on a suicide mission, and the man who achieved transcendence realized it wasn't so great after all. About the only person who didn't fall for the time-switch trap was the girl too busy having steamy lesbian sex and avoiding mops, which should be a lesson we all keep close to our hearts.
It is, however, one of the undeniable truths of life that no matter how crazy you're acting, if you complain long enough and loud enough you will eventually convince someone else that you're correct, and such it was with Captain Gorus and his
crew. After enough of them had sufficiently sabotaged their lives to prove they had had all their dreams fulfilled, some members of the Naval Command began to come around to their way of thinking and funded a few explorations which all ended horribly, often with the words “Why the bear again!?” scrawled in blood written in the wreckage somewhere. Not to be daunted, proponents of Captain Gorus' theory turned their attention to a smallish planet a mere six million miles from the Outer Edge named Yuthun.

“It's... it's beautiful!” exclaimed Lahra.
It certainly was. While a bit on the small side, Yuthun was relatively sparsely populated, and vast tracts of it were almost entirely unspoiled by the hand of man*. The seas glowed blue-orange in the light of the mostly-white sun, and the two moons, Hapag and Dapag, spun in perfect concentric circles around the poles. The mountains were rough and unspoiled, the forests were lovely, dark and deep, and even the deserts managed to look their best
for the camera. What few towns there were that could be seen from orbit were orderly and artfully designed by the generations, and the landscape was unmarred by nuclear fallout, impact crater, or ruin; to call it 'utopian' would be an insult. The place made utopias look like old dog turds by comparison.
[*- It has often been remarked that, for a race incapable of stellar travel until far into its history, humans seem to have the most interesting habit of popping up in the most unlikely places, such as places long, long ago in galaxies far, far away, for no real reason more concrete than “because fuck you.” While that answer is certainly considered rude by some standards, it also happens to be the absolute truth: evolution follows a set pattern, and one of the most respectable criteria set forth by the guidelines of evolution is that the species most willing to crush, copulate, and consume will be the one most likely to take command of a territory. A lesser corollary of this
guideline, however, is that when two species of exactly matched skills meet, the one who manages to look the most silly will win, if for no other reason than the false confidence this gives the other, or that the uglier one just has more to prove; given the billions and billions of permutations that take place during a usual evolutionary smack-down for world domination, it is next to impossible that something as ludicrous-looking as the human body wouldn't eventually come along to take the belt. So the next time you notice that the beard on your neck grows faster than the rest of your hair, or how every bendable angle of your body seems to be developing a waddle, or for no good reason the other one is dangling lower today, do it with pride, because that's why the world isn't being run by mutant snail-sharks.**]
[**- I know, I know, I think it'd be way more awesome if the world was run by mutant snail-sharks too.]

“It is very pretty, isn't it?” Said the captain dryly.
“We're going to blow it up.”

(Chapter 1 to be continued)