In the Name of Earth

Chapter 14: Whenever You Miss Me, Look Up at the Stars

The once lush and prosperous colony of Deven had been reduced to ashes and ruins. While Marvin, Ludwig and their two new companions trailed through the destruction, feet crushing the chunks of cracking cement and scorched fruit remains, dying fires sizzled all around, accompanied by pained cries of despair and grief. Overturned transports blocked the roads and bloodied survivors tried digging their belonging and loved ones from under collapsed structures. The various colorful cultivation globes had all been shattered, and a good portion of the Colonial Administration Building had been reduced to rubble.

“This is horrible,” Reel said, big eyes sweeping the scene at the human’s knee height. “Such a waste… All this precious, precious corn!”

“Eyes front, Reel,” Jade, back in her armor, despite not wearing a helmet, hissed at the alien. “Now’s not the time to fall out the rover-wagon.”

The small pilot tried, but couldn’t help eyeballing a dusty cob rolling in the wind.

“What’s his deal?” Marvin whispered to Jade.

“He’s an addict.”

“I was an addict!” Reel corrected. “Been clean for over a year and I have the CCA badge to prove it!”

“A year for his people, little more than a month to us,” Jade shrugged. “He’s an addict.”

“A corn addict?” Lud raised his fair eyebrows. Marvin knew better than to ask, but he shared the confused feeling.

“Eh, the yellow thingies are nutritive and all,” Reel spoke, eyeing another dusty cob. “Energetic, not that tasty… meh! But when you bomb it with radiation… o-ho-ho! POP! Little bastard flips inside out! That’s the good stuff! Crazy-Corn!”

“You mean popcorn?” Marvin asked.

“Excuse me, have you been a Crazy-Cornhead for the best part of your third century alive? No? Then what do you, know, human? By the way, now that there are three of you, I’ll need to figure out how to call y’all. Don’t wanna resort to human one, two and three.”

“You could just use our names,” Jade suggested.

“Yeah, right!” Reel rolled his popped eyes.

“Here we are,” Lud interrupted once the administrative headquarters of Deven towered before them. Or what was left of it. “Mind your steps, this structure is not sound at all.”

“Any idea where the Chief-Ambassador would’ve been?” Jade asked.

Marvin shook his head.

“Let’s split up!” Reel hurried to propose.

“Let’s,” Jade agreed. “But you’ll be coming with me. I don’t trust you near the corn, mister. If anyone finds something or gets in trouble, you have our frequencies.”

***

The administrative halls were in precarious state, but whatever portion of them remained standing suggested that they had been a sight to behold. It shrunk Marvin’s heart to think about it: an entire colony, a society where countless species lived in harmony, shattered that easily. All that remained of that wonderous city was the memory of its vista from the spaceport landing pad.

A memory Marvin would treasure forever.

“Father!” his shout echoed through the empty crumbling corridors and out over the colony, melding into another dozen similar cries. “Dad! Alexa!”

Only his echo responded.

There was no telling how long he had been looking, but it had been exhausting. Now, once again, he reached a dead end. Another corridor ending in the point where the building had collapsed, leading to an abyss overlooking the pile of iron and concrete that had one day been the continuation of that hallway.

Marvin crashed with his back against the wall and slid until he was seated on the edge of the ruin, brown eyes taking in the devastation from above. In the distance, the tall spaceport stood scorched and mangled corwned the unsalvageable husk of the EDV Jenkins shadowing the sun fall. Was that Earth’s destiny? The destiny of every major human city? To be reduced to ash in name of galactic ecology? All so a there was room for Globian investments?

Aid was already arriving from off-world in the form of supply and medical ships descending on the colony outskirts… not unlike the attacker ships had done not long ago.

But there was more to be seen under the sun. A massive hole had been opened on the green cultivation dome. The one that, according to his father, comported the corn plantations. From that hole, a spill of corn cobs littered the ruins, enough to drive Reel insane should he see it. But the cobs did not spill out randomly. No. They formed a path. A concentrated trail that ended on three large wedge marks on the soil.

Marvin rose to his feet, eyes scanning the colony to find the same wedge marks over and over again everywhere. Always by the threes, always perfectly equal.

The raider ships’ landing gear!

The cobs on the ground had been the spill of the pirates loading one of their ships with the spoils. With corn.

Marvin was still processing the deduction and its implications when Jade’s voice came in over the communicators.

“Guys, we found a human. Female, deceased. I’m sorry.”

***

Marvin came running to Jade and Reel’s position, expecting to find Alexa’s cold corpse, but that was not the case. He felt extremely guilty of feeling relieved at the sight, but he barely knew the woman with the scorched chest, and right now that was all he could hope for. Perhaps Alexa and his father would still be safe.

The burn marks on the woman’s chest were the obvious lethal wounds, and only visible injuries. That section of the building was mostly preserved, meaning she had not succumbed to the effects of demolition or fire. She had been shot by a laser gun. There was also the matter of a strange artifact hugging her neck. Not anything Marvin was familiar with.

“Administrator Hasan!” Ludwig gasped as he entered the room, then hurried to the fallen woman’s side and closed her dusty eyelids. “Scheisse! She was a good woman.”

“She was with my father and the others,” Marvin said, a knot forming on his stomach. “Alexa and Qui’Mal.”

“Then that explains some things,” Jade paced around the woman, standing behind her head, where a letter opener laid on the dusty floor right next to Hasan’s limp hand. “She grabbed this and tried to resist, they shot her down before she could get one of them.”

“Don’t know if you noticed, but they were shooting everyone!” Lud snapped.

“Not everyone,” Jade knelt down and picked the letter opener, then jammed it into the metallic device around Hasan’s throat, forcing it to click open. Jade showcased the artifact, then stuck it to her belt. “Tracking collar. Popular among slavers. If she hadn’t resisted, they’d have taken her away.”

“So they took my dad!” the realization came to Marvin as a mix of pessimistic hope and optimistic despair.

“Probably,” Reel spoke next. “Continue down the hall and you’ll find a stairway to the rooftop. Perfect pickup spot for a shuttle.”

“We have to find them!” Marvin was pacing impatiently. “Do you know who these guys are?”

Jade shook her head. Reel denied too.

“Too many Causer pirate factions, human. Could be any of them. There’s no finding your friends. Just drop it.”

“Maybe not finding my friends,” Marvin was still pacing. “But if I learned something on Galactic Logistics is that you can never move a large volume of merchandise unnoticed. You’ll always leave a trail. I think they were looting corn, they should be taking that somewhere. We find the corn, we find the pirates; we find the pirates we find my dad; find my dad and he saves Earth!”

“I said drop it, human!” Reel barked again. “No wonder their reviewing your Sentience Status! You lost here, time to move on!”

Marvin opened his mouth to contend, but Jade’s light hand, although armored, rested over his shoulder.

“I know it’s hard to hear, but he’s right,” the redhead whispered. “There’s no telling how long it’d take to find your dad, and right now our priority is stopping the end of the world. Our world.”

“But… You said only he could do it…”

“We’ll have to find an alternative,” Jade sighed, still squeezing Marvin’s tense shoulder. “It’s what he’d have wanted.”

“Then what do we do?” Lud asked while tears rolled down Marvin’s scraped cheeks.

“We go back to Gaia Station,” Jade said. “Inform whoever his replacement is, let them handle it.”

His replacement who would be Watson. The bastard who had conspired with General Silva to bypass the Chief-Ambassador’s decision regarding Supernova Protocol. All too convenient for them. Perhaps the Globians weren’t the ones behind that attack after all.

“Come on, man,” Lud laid a hand on Marvin’s sore back. “Let’s go home.”

“I’ll be right there,” Marvin said, voice threatening to break. “Just give me a moment.”

After exchanging a knowing glance with Jade, Lud nodded and left his friend by himself on the morbid corridor where Administrator Hasan would forever rest. Once the others were gone, Marvin crossed the corridor to the staircase Reel had mentioned, leading to the roof.

The cool night breeze received the human, accompanied by the stench of blood and burned grass. His mind, though, was on the early nightly skies above them. More emergency ships came down, but Marvin looked past them, past the smoke from the ruins and past the scarce clouds. He looked at the stars, his father’s words from over a decade ago returning to him.

“Whenever you miss me, look up at the stars. I’ll be looking too.”

Marvin was looking up at the stars.

And wherever his father was, Marvin knew he was looking at the stars too.