Mission 13 - Actualisation - Part 1

  TA419 - date no longer known,

  Surface of Planet Abhaile, The Royal Captial.

  Stepping onto the side streets was a strange experience for Chas Collins. Exhausted and barely hydrated, it would have been surreal at the best of times, but that wasn’t all.

  He'd spent a couple of months in the northern city of Bannerman, but it had been different. To an outsider, the roads are dust lined, the buildings drab without much style - but spend any time there and you soon learned the great lengths the local council go to maintaining that. Massive sweepers stopped the dust from ever building up. Storm wardens made sure every shutter was closed, paying special attention to the elderly or ill to ensure none get trapped without something vital during a storm. Building maintenance and water rationing - it took a lot to keep a city on the ‘red planet’ in good condition. This city, Abhiale's capital, did not have such care.

  The road he'd stepped onto was piled high; dust lay so thick it was more like snow, each step he took leaving a footprint as he sunk in slightly. Buildings were a mess, and any sign of love was long gone. Faded paint, cracked stonework, doors barely hanging on their hinges. More still had been abandoned, parts of walls had fallen in, dust shutters gone, the windows behind smashed.

  Chas hesitantly wandered down this 'street', and an unwelcomed image of what it must have once looked like came to him. Painstakingly painted buildings gave either side colour. A pile of rubble to one side had perhaps been a market stall. Bunting ran between the two-story buildings on either side. Children played freely, this little community all looking out for them. Was it some Magi reaction to what once was, or just the street itself, a four hundred-year-old city that still remembered what had been just a few years ago?

  Before long, he crossed out of the side street and onto, he quickly realised, the Capital's main boulevard. It stretched more than a mile behind and in front of him. The tallest buildings he'd ever seen on the planet to either side, faded shop signs of all kinds. Rotting outdoor furniture and canopies outside of what was once the finest cafes and restaurants of the planet’s oldest settlement.

  Entire buildings had crumbled, creating tatty gaps all along the length of the grand city centre. Little more than caution tape was placed in front of these wrecks.

  The most magnificent palace Chas had ever seen stood in the distance, at the end of the impressively long road covered in military vehicle tracks and threads and even the odd Vijiak footprint. It made the mansion of the Duke of Bannerman look cute. It sprawled so wide that the street obscured his view of its extremities; its trilling towers soared into the sky, or at least the ones that hadn't been cut down partway. Its brickwork, even from this distance, was beautifully carved and inlaid with fine metals. Like the rest of the main street, it had taken immense damage; entire blocks seemed to have been hastily rebuilt, and Chas noticed the barbed wire fence in front of it probably wasn't what the original architect had in mind. Still, even so, it was the majestic seat of a monarchy that had once ruled over an entire planet.

  "Hey, mister, what are you doing?" a young voice called at him, and a moment later, someone tugged Chas's sleeve.

  The young ace pilot nearly jumped out of his skin, so taken in with the palace that he hadn't been paying attention. The streets were so devoid of people he'd almost forgotten this was still a living city. He’d almost begin to worry again that he was all alone.

  "Err, I just got lost, I guess," he replied, lips still dry, his voice more raspy than he would have liked. He turned to look at the little kid, a ten-year-old maybe, with scruffy, dusty brown hair and borderline ragged clothes.

  The child looked genuinely concerned for him, "Staring at the Governor’s house is dangerous. Uncle says the Governor’s men beat people up for it 'cause the Governor thinks you're ‘gonna steal his stuff."

  "Oh, I see, does he now?" Chas replied gently. He doubted that story was true; that would be quite the overreaction for a TSU official to take, right? It sounded more like the ordinary lies of an uncle.

  "Come on, it's not safe this time of day," the kid added, dragging on his sleeve.

  Chas paused momentarily before letting the child drag him back into the side street. He had no real plan to begin - he'd just had to get away from it all - now that he finally had, all he really wanted was a rest.

  "What do your parents think of the Governor?" he asked as they squelched through the piled dust, curiosity mounting, conversation making him feel a bit more like himself again.

  The kid shuddered a little, "Daddy went to war with the King but didn't come back. Mommy is fighting now. It's just me and uncle..."

  Chas cringed, "Oh, sorry."

  An unhappy silence fell between them until they faced a rather narrow building. Next to its door was a cellar entrance. The kid fumbled with the door, Chas steping foward to open it for them. Genuinely intrigued at this point, Chas let the kid guide him down a flight of steps.

  "Uncle, we're back," the boy called happily.

  From down a corridor appeared the face of an aged man, "Bout time, curfews already past you rascal, and who's this 'we'? I swear if you've been chasing stray viver again--" the old man, his wisened beard and wrinkled face, paused seeing Chas.

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  "Ah, sorry, I'll be going now," the young ace pilot said meekly.

  The Abhailein people were known for being an inhospitable bunch, quick to anger, or so Chas had always been told, and it dawned on him that it might look weird for a stranger to be wandering around with a child. He suddenly felt very aware of his very 'not-Abhialen' complexion and accent.

  But before he could step away, the old man grinned massively, "Come in, come in. Tea's brewing!"

  A little hesitantly, Chas followed the kid down the corridor. About halfway, a booming voice bellowed at him, "Oi keep it down, you two!"

  Chas blinked, "A relative?"

  "Hmm? No silly, that's Miss Montague, one of our neighbours on this floor," the kid smiled.

  "She's nice, real soft spot for Al," the old man added, and a snort could be heard behind the wall.

  Chas barely heard them; he was too busy being blown away. In this small basement were living multiple families? With dividing walls, the more he looked at, that were no more than cheap partitions.

  A single room was at the end of this partitioned wall hallway; a bachelor apartment would be putting it generously. A table and a couple of chairs at the centre, a kitchen of sorts to one corner with a stove next to it. There were some beds in the opposite corner and a relatively small and torn couch in the final space. Chas was shocked at the idea two people were living in such a space. There were clear signs of mould, and based on the lack of a door, a communal toilet must be located elsewhere, shared between multiple families?

  He wondered about the hygiene of it; if one person got sick with a shared lavatory and walls this thin, it would spread instantly. This was no place for anyone to live, not even his worst-- 'Oh right', he paused, remembering these were indeed the people of his enemy, the Abhailens.

  "Has it always been like this," he half whispered as he took a seat at the table alongside the child, 'Al'.

  The old man paused a moment before bursting into a massive fit of laughter; "Sorry, sorry, it's rude to laugh at strangers. I just couldn't help it. You must think we're barbarians to ask if it's always been like this."

  Chas reddened a little at that. The old man continued, "Before the war, before my young'in here can even remember - well, the weak atmosphere meant we never had skyscrapers true enough, but mostly we were as modern a city as any on Bhaile. Bustling traffic, intricate in-fra-structure, ‘busy economy, councilmen, governments - t’whole shebang. It’s only after the Governor took over it ‘become like this."

  Chas took note of the old man’s heavy accent, the odd word off its correct pronunciation, but that didn’t mean he was lying per se, "The governor, huh? Al mentioned him being, err, 'scary'."

  "Ha, not the half of it. Get caught outside much later than you two got back, and his men will beat you silly, age irrelevant."

  "Y-you really mean that?"

  The old man fixed him with a more sombre stare, "You ain't from around here, that's for sure. Kid, whatever you think, it's probably only half the truth. When the war ended, this city and others all over the planet erupted into fire."

  "Fire? Like metaphorically?" Chas said, straightening up at the more serious tone.

  "Well, that too, but mostly literally. I'm nay a tinfoil hat kinda’ man, but pretty much everyone knows TSU had spread infiltrators across the planet. When word of the end came, they sprung into action, riots everywhere started by the pro-union faction. That was just the ‘art.

  Any military unit that could fled to the Isles of Remembrance within days. We knew the war was lost, but no one realised the planet was too. ‘Thought those forces would be coming back to protect us, but they never did… For a week, it was civil war, total anarchy. The soldiers were gone, the King and most of the government and nobility dead, the pro-union guys stirring resentment. You've seen the state of our city, a lot of it we did to ourselves.

  Then TSU came ‘proper. Many welcomed them at that point; surely they would at least stop the riots. But no... They eviscerated any potentially ‘rouge element’. Their own sympathisers and hold-outs of our forces. Our law enforcement.

  Heh, they say there isn't a police station still standing south of Fal-Dara, and well, I've certainly nerry seen one. It really were like the world was ending. Thousands of innocents died, and what was left of t’economy crippled. It was the end of the world--" the old man stopped when a whimpering caught his and Chas's attention.

  The scruffy little kid, Al, was trembling. Biting his lower lip, on the verge of tears, "M-Mommy's gonna fix it, Mommy will make it right again," he said before bursting into tears.

  Chas wanted to hug him, this child, literally crying for his mother.

  He also wanted to deny it, that TSU would so violently mistreat a defeated people, abuse them, kick them when they were down, and drive them to the brink of starvation. They were, ‘we are’, he corrected, the good guys. They stopped the Remembrance- the Abhailen scum.

  But the proof was right in front of him, a city of destroyed buildings, simply left in pieces five years after the war ended. Families crammed into tiny living spaces, streets deserted, bussiness long closed for good. A child, no doubt malnutrition, probably receiving no education past what this one old man, not even his father, could give him. So much abandoned land on his way here, whole villages and towns left to rot in the ever-piling dust.

  The old man stepped over and hugged his young charge, "I'm sorry Al-y, I really ran my mouth there, haha... You tell yourself you're numb ta’ it, but I guess once you get going, well. Sorry Al, of course, your momma is fighting to make it right again," tears weld in the old man's eyes too.

  Chas held it back, the urge to hug them, the urge to cry himself. What possible right would he have to do so? He was their enemy; this boy's mother could be a pilot or boarder he'd shot down for all he knew.

  He'd come here without thought. He'd just been running away from the noise in his head. What right did he have to empathise with these people suffering because of the organisation he worked for?

  The young man stared at the two embrace, sobbing under the tiny room's poor light.

  He tried to imagine what it had been like for the man. His brother or brother-in-law dying in the war. His sister running off to follow that same path, leaving him with a child not his own in a world on fire.

  He could picture this frail man in the street above as the dust fell like snow around him, under a sky as red as the fires burning all around. A child too young to remember what was happening in his arms, as their own people rioted and looted one another, as their four-hundred-year-old dream of independence died. As the mighty and just States Union came in to crush what little they had left.

  Chas imagined all that and wanted to cry.