The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

even though she didn’t really know us. One of these Chancellors – he was from Earth, but he sounded like a Carrier Chancellor – he asked me a question. He said, ‘How do you know you’re immortal?’ So, I told him. I was proud to describe our rebirth after liberation. He didn’t understand. Typical.

“But the whole time I was speaking,” Rosa said, dragging out the story, “I was thinking about what I should do to him.”

“What?” Horst said. “Right then and there?”

“Yes. I wished I had a phasic driver like this one.” She held it up in one hand, a potato in the other. “I wanted to leap off the table and throw him to the ground. Then this,” she said, her tool bearing down on the potato, “would have been his head. One. Two. Three.”

She tossed the potato on a conveyor to be washed with hundreds of others and held up a perfectly stripped skin. Laughter and applause greeted her final execution.

Sam forced a polite smile. This wasn’t the first Chancellor scalp story she heard, and no one on the line wrote it off as a joke.

Their rage was real, perhaps even justified given what some of these children endured. All were created inside SkyTower and most hidden on colonies where they did not mix well with the indigo populations. Discussions like this unsettled Sam. She knew what her own people were, having learned those lessons the hard way after growing up indoctrinated into Chancellor ideology. But she didn’t want these children to paint all Chancellors with the same brush.

Sam also realized the production line was not the time to interrupt their reverie with lecture. These were smart children, but they trained with blast rifles in live-fire exercises and studied holomanuals on ground combat techniques. Sam did not want to feel like a prisoner again.

Yet she waded into dangerous water at the evening dine.

“I wonder,” she asked over a meal of stewed fish and tomatoes with herbs, steamed potatoes, and a fruit bowl. “You’ve been given such a beautiful world, do any of you think about living here in peace instead of fighting wars against the Chancellors?”

Horst, Gyselle, and Rosa, whose assignment schedule kept them together all day long, smiled at each other without responding. She couldn’t tell if the question aggravated them or was simply outside their frame of reference. Like Sam, they were shown Brother James’s light shortly after liberation. Unlike Sam, its impact remained ever-present through their single-minded devotion.

Finally, Horst responded. “Sure. Everybody wants to live in peace. That’s obvious. But it’s not practical.”

“Why not?” Sam said.

“We can’t build an empire without killing our enemies.”

“I see. Do you need an empire?”

“Not yet. But the Chancellors want what we have, so we’ll kill them until they stop trying to take it.”

Gyselle nodded. “After we get rid of them, other people will learn what we have on Aeterna. They’ll build armies, too.”

“The indigos, you mean?”

“Yes. We have many allies already, but most indigos hate us.”

“Right,” Horst agreed. “That’s where a strong empire comes in. We liberate the other immortals, recruit allies, fill out our cities, and build an armada of Slope ships. We’ll use wormholes and refractors to crush any opposition. Then we’ll have an empire and we can live in peace.”

“And how many years,” Sam said, “will this take, Horst?”

He mulled it over. “I’m thinking thirty or forty years. Tops. How about you lot?”

Gyselle estimated fifty, while Rosa proposed a more optimistic twenty. Eleven-year-old Rikhi Syed, who arrived here on a Scramjet with Sam and who executed Ophelia Tomelin last year onboard Lioness, spoke up for the first time since the meal began.

“You’re wrong. All of you. We’ll be done in five years. Look how fast Brother James and Admiral Valentin threw them off the colonies. People used to think Chancellors were gods, but they’re weak. We killed two million in hours.” He snapped his fingers. “They’re afraid.”

Horst wasn’t convinced. “Yes, Rikhi, they can’t match our singularity weapons, but two million is nothing. That’s one fifth of one percent. We can’t neutralize the Chancellors for good until we invade Earth, and we’ll need ages to build a galactic fleet that’s big enough.”

They talked around Sam as if they’d forgotten her background. Or maybe, Sam reasoned, they didn’t care what she heard because they knew she would die on Aeterna. They rattled on about body counts, favorite weapons and ship designs, new refractors using larger singularities, and applying to become Slope navigators. The word ‘peace’ never returned to the conversation.

She sat at this table before, except it was the kitchen of her home in Albion, Alabama. Her father Walt spoke often of military tactics and principles, glowing as he waxed nostalgic about his own Guard service. He infused Sam with dreams of peacekeeper glory on distant battlefields. Unable to discuss these matters outside the home, he encouraged Sam to ask questions at the dinner table. Her mother never interjected. Grace Pynn spent her formative years in the politicorporate world, as far removed from the Guard as a Chancellor might be. Not once did she offer Sam another life path, conceding a military destiny for her daughter.

The irony did not escape Sam. These children had two fathers, both of whom preached a destiny of vengeance achieved through slaughter and conquest. Like her mother, Sam did not try to force this bellicose dialogue in another direction. Nor did any of them ask her for tips on how to defeat the Chancellors.

They smiled through the evening dine and the post-meal cleanup, their joy and optimism unmatched by anything Sam experienced on either Earth. Yet their numbers were few, and Sam feared the early victories were, as her father used to say, fool’s gold. After the meal, they strolled JaRa’s broad avenues during the final minutes before sunset then said their goodbyes. Next stop: