The Course of Empire(2)

Exhilarated at finally having the opportunity to be of use, Aille attenuated his perception of the moment's flow in order to better take in his new surroundings. The wind-tossed waves slowed to languid, enticing swells and reminded him that he'd had no opportunity to swim since leaving Marit An. His ship was equipped with adequate sanitary facilities, but not the luxury of an actual pool. After the long trip, his skin felt desiccated, his nap stiff, and his whiskers reduced to lifeless strings. He longed to immerse himself in this new sea, despite its alien scent, and sluice the accumulated dregs of travel away.



First, however, he must officially accept his new command. Later, when the flow of arrival was complete, he would indulge himself.



The yellow sun of this solar system beat down, brighter than Nir, his homeworld's star, which was farther along in the main sequence. He gazed out past the base's buildings, whiskers quivering. The land before him was so unrelentingly—flat.



He thought wistfully of the cliffs back at his kochan-house. There, the tide pounded against massive black rocks both early and late, and the breeze was always filled with the refreshing cool tang of spray. Here, the sultry air was thick with indigenous salts and more than a hint of decay. Well, his time on Marit An had completed itself. It was the duty of all Jao scions to cast themselves into time's river in the ongoing struggle against the Ekhat, and that he would do.



The voyage from his birthworld, Marit An, to Terra had been long but fruitful, filled with discourse with his fraghta and study for the responsibilities which awaited him. It was his last opportunity to take advantage of the older Jao's accumulated wisdom before assuming his new post as Subcommandant and he did his best to absorb as much as possible. By the end, he believed he knew the indigenous species as well as anyone could without ever having come nose to nose with one.



Farther away, in the distance, Aille could see several ruined buildings. Those were apparently a legacy of the Jao conquest over twenty orbital cycles ago. He had detected more signs of unamended damage as he'd swept in for landing: fractured, overgrown roads, cast-off machinery, abandoned dwellings now inundated by wilderness. By all reports, this political moiety had resisted long after the rest of this stubborn world and therefore had suffered proportionally greater damage.



They were an odd breed, these "humans," frustrating in their reluctance to be civilized and unique in many respects from any other species ever conquered by the Jao. Recorded reports detailed their long resistance to Jao rule and it seemed they were not completely subdued even now, so many orbital cycles later. Pockets of discontent and unrest apparently still persisted across the globe.



It would take a few solar cycles for his timesense to synchronize with local circadian rhythms, but for now Aille allowed normal flow to reassert itself. Then he drew in a deep breath as his stolid fraghta, Yaut krinnu Jithra vau Pluthrak, emerged from the ship. The older Jao's vai camiti, or facial pattern, was plain yet pleasing, strong and highly visible, unmistakably Jithra to anyone experienced at reading faces. Yaut hesitated halfway down the ramp and his nostrils flared at the unfamiliar scents.



The Jao, ever practical, used filters to sanitize their atmosphere wherever they constructed their kochan-houses so that unpleasant scents did not intrude. But, according to reports, Terrans rarely concerned themselves with such matters, although they were generally more sensitive than Jao to environmental conditions.



According to his briefings, this particular base was one of the first built after the Jao's initial invasion of this world, and still the largest. Constructed on the site of an already extant shipyard, it had been intended to impress on the local political entity just how pointless resistance was by then. Nevertheless, almost another orbital cycle had been required to effect full control. Several major population centers, including the ones known as "Chicago" and "New Orleans," had been destroyed in the process, allegedly still sore points with the quarrelsome natives after all this time.



Aille locked his hands behind his back, cocked his head at the precise long-practiced angle of measured-anticipation, and waited as a detail of jinau soldiers in crisp dark-blue uniforms emerged from between buildings. They marched across the hard surface, their legs matched in stride, providing his first look at the conquered species outside vids and stills.



They were shorter than most Jao, slender of build where Jao tended to be square and solid. The outlines of bones were clearly visible through their mostly naked skin, wherever they neglected to cover themselves with fabric. Their features were not quite balanced, the eyes too far apart, the faces too flat, giving them a comic exaggerated look. The ears were the most disturbingly alien, little more than stationary rounded flaps on the sides of their heads which never suggested the slightest hint of what they were thinking.