This battle would always be part of my life. There would always be people who didn’t think I was really human. I’d been bitterly angry about that for years, and a lot of that anger was aimed at myself. When people keep telling you something, it has an effect on you. I’d had the perfect example of that with the Alien Contact programme. Everything I’d been taught, every mention of meeting aliens, had assumed humanity would meet them during Planet First explorations of a new sector. Even knowing that Alien Contact had called me in, I hadn’t been able to step back from that ingrained idea and work out that the aliens must have come to Earth.
Of course I’d been affected by the off-worlders’ views of the Handicapped as well. Every day of my life, I’d been reminded of them in one way or another. Growing up a ward of Hospital Earth because my own parents had rejected me. Hearing the jokes on the off-world vids, about how people like me were ugly and stupid. Knowing I’d never have the right to vote, or …
Part of me had absorbed those ideas, and felt I wasn’t really human. I’d tried to fight my insecurity by being the best at everything, dumping the subjects like science, where I could only manage to be average. That was why joining this class had been more about proving things to myself than to the hated exos.
I didn’t feel that way any longer. It had taken a combination of the acceptance of my friends and Fian, the Military awarding me the Artemis medal, and a truly alien race sending a probe to Earth to convince me, but it had finally happened. The words Candace and my psychologist had said to me a thousand times really were true. I was as normal and human and valuable as any off-worlder, I just had a faulty immune system.
That realization wouldn’t magically give me a family, mean I could travel to the stars, or stop some people from calling me names, but it still helped. My Handicap would always cause me problems, but I had a lot of good things in my life as well. Fian, my friends, and my joy in history. I was even an officer in the Military now. If it wasn’t for the threat of that alien sphere up in Earth orbit …
I was lifting my head to give the usual instinctive look at the sky, when my lookup chimed. I accepted the live link from Asgard, and forgot about aliens while I listened to the funeral of a friend. It was happening on a distant planet in Gamma sector, while I was standing among a sea of turquoise flowers on one of the deserts of Earth. When it was my turn to speak, people had to wait a few seconds before they heard my voice because of the comms portal lag as my words were relayed through Alpha and Gamma sector to Asgard, and Fian had to light my candle for me. None of that mattered. I could still take part in the funeral as we said goodbye to Joth.
18
It took a while for things to get back to normal after the funeral. The Dig Site Federation Accident Specialist insisted on us suffering an entire day of boredom while Playdon repeated all the special Eden safety lectures. The following day, Eden Dig Site closed entirely while a doctor went around every dome giving people special inoculation shots. The class did get outside the next morning, but we didn’t go further than the edge of the ruins, and spent the whole time practising specialist sensor sled alarm drills.
Repeating lectures had just been tedious, but the drills were four solid hours of screeching sirens and hard physical work. Most of the time, the sensor sled just screams its standard alarm that means pull the tag leader out of the danger area, but some alarms warn of a serious threat to the whole team. Unstable ground, you get to the clearway as fast as possible. Tower falling, you get away as fast as possible and just keep going. Magnetic, you cut all lift beams, abandon sleds, and run like chaos before things start exploding or your own suit kills you. Radiation, you head for the nearest evac portal and get Dig Site Command to warn Hospital Earth Casualty to prepare for a hot team arrival. Chemical is like radiation, except you pause on the way to the evac portal to spray yourselves with decontaminant.
Four hours of that added up to an awful lot of running, which is no fun at all when you’re wearing restrictive impact suits. We all hated it, but even Krath had enough sense not to utter a word of complaint. Playdon had had to portal to Asgard at two that morning to be interrogated by his department head back at University Asgard, and had barely got back in time for breakfast. He was even more exhausted than we were.
That evening, I watched Petra’s old friends pointedly ignoring her, and felt sorry enough for her to try approaching her myself. She answered my attempt at sympathy in a savage voice. ‘Don’t you realize I’d rather not have any friends than be friends with you. Nuke off!’