Page 60 of Etched in Stone
“No. Not at all. I’ve been away for a thousand years, and this is, well, nearly the same as I left it.
And these quarters, they are what you’d call the red carpet treatment. A simple engineer would never merit such spacious quarters.”
“He said you were a war hero. There’s a war?”
“My planet is at war with the Ektop. It has consumed everything. Our entire mission was to find resources to help end the war. We crashed after a solar flare knocked us off course.”
“What kind of war lasts a thousand years?”
“I don’t know. I imagine the war ended years ago, and we were just not worth retrieving. I don’t know what’s changed.” Ray went to the storage area and nearly cried when he opened the drawer to find several uniforms. He immediately shucked off his old cloth and slipped on a fresh uniform. Jesse giggled.
“Oh, my God, I’ve never seen you with actual clothes on.”
“What do you think?”
“You can still put on a fedora.” Ray smiled and stepped toward Jesse but the short ding stopped him in his tracks.
The door opened and a large Khargal stepped through the doorway. He wore the insignia of a captain and the bearing to match. The fangy smile he flashed Jesse reminded Ray of a few officers promoted beyond their skill, simply because of their predecessors’ bad luck or their own family connections.
“Well met, brother,” he said. “I am Captain Traver, and we are honored to be your escort home.”
Ray said nothing. There was something odd about this man's cordiality.
“So how's the war?” Jesse said after a long silence.
“The war is over. We were victorious, and now we have come back to reclaim those that were fallen.”
“I wasn't fallen. Our ship crashed. Where have you been for the past thousand or so years?” Ray demanded.
“Ah, this is a question many of your shipmates have been asking. There is a distortion, between
here and Duras. According to Durassian time, you've only been gone for twenty years. It has taken this long for the war to end and for us to begin making amends.”
“Amends?”
“Of course, you will receive a generous retirement package, and there will be opportunities for you to tell the tale of your years to the masses. Share anything you learned while surviving on a savage and primitive planet.”
“Hey, that's my home you're talking about,” Jesse said, testily.
'You do not even have a colony in space yet. You’re just an orbital society, not worth the blink of our attention,” Traver responded.
Jesse looked at Ray to back her up. He just shrugged.
“You've come a long way in the past forty years, but you are practically savages,” Ray said.
“Thanks. Just, thanks,” Jesse replied.
Ray wasn't going to lie, but he also wasn't going to buy the full line of bullshit this captain was feeding them.
“Why? Why have you come back to get us when you could have just as easily left us there and written us off as dead?”
The captain leaned in, as if he were whispering a secret.
“The Council has made some unpopular decisions lately. They saw this as an opportunity to-”
“It's a PR stunt,” Jesse said, finally catching on.
“I do not know what this means,” the captain stumbled. Ray knew exactly what it meant.
