“...”
“Are you going to tell me you’ll answer once the prosthetics are on again? Then I’ll never hear that answer as long as I live, is that it?”
It was a declaration that he never wanted the prosthetics attached. Not having expected resistance this violent, the captain hesitated a moment. But Luca had shut the door of his heart once before, and it would take nothing at all for him to withdraw for good this time.
“I’ll tell you.”
They’d arrived at the captain’s quarters without his noticing, and a familiar voice greeted them.
“Welcome back, Captain Luka. Identity confirmed.”
Still carrying him, the captain stepped into a space where no one could disturb them, a space for two.
“The reason I brought you here. The reason it had to be you. And,”
With a hydraulic sigh the door swung shut. Looking down at the boy in his arms, the captain’s eyes shone the same brilliant gold as always.
“the reason you and I are both Luka.”
He set Luca down carefully on the sofa in the middle of the room. Luca’s gaze went to something he hadn’t paid much attention to on his first visit.
A solid-wood bookcase standing tall against one wall. It was packed with books made of paper. Paper books were relics of an earlier age, hard to find anywhere now. Even back home he’d only seen the material when he signed the enrollment oath as a special priest candidate.
“There’s something I want to show you.”
The captain’s large hand touched a control panel on the wall. A section of it slid smoothly open, revealing a small shelf.
A wooden case sat on it. He reached out and tapped it, and a small holographic device rose from inside. Blue particles gathered above it, and soon a recorded image of some planet began to play.
“This is... what planet is this?”
The world in the hologram was far greener and more alive than the place Luca had lived, an unfamiliar paradise where enormous trees rose as if to pierce the sky.
“This is a planet called Earth. It vanished a very long time ago.”
“...Earth?”
“Under the Galactic Alliance’s standard designation, it’s Terra-Origin-01. Have you heard of it?”
Terra-Origin-01.
There was no way not to know that famous planet. Because Luca’s own world, Eremos, was a desert planet colonized by the humans of Terra-Origin-01.
Standard designation Terra-Eremos-09. The ninth world Earth’s people had settled.
“I know it. It’s our ancestors’ first planet.”
The captain’s voice brightened at the answer.
“Did you learn that at the Academy?”
“Mm...”
“Then do you also know that the traditional martial arts you trained in actually carry a very old history running all the way back to Earth?”
Luca faltered. When they’d talked about traditional martial arts, the captain hadn’t seemed to know a thing about them.
Was he pretending not to know when he knew all along?
Then again, he must have known at least who Luca was and what he studied, or he wouldn’t have pulled him off that collapsing planet.
Why does he never tell me anything properly? Is it because I don’t badger him with questions...?
Until now the struggle to survive had loomed larger, and there’d been no room to ask. Knowing that, the man might have been holding his tongue on purpose, to spare him worries and troubles.
Still, there was no helping how sly it felt, the ease with which he concealed things. If he ever set out to deceive him in earnest, Luca would walk into the trap without even suspecting it.
Wary as he was, Luca nodded obediently. That let the captain speak about himself a little more easily.
“I’m one of those Earthlings. To be precise, the officially last surviving human from a destroyed Earth.”
Luca’s tangled thoughts stopped dead.
...What?
He knew Earth had been destroyed; he’d learned it in history class. What shocked him was the captain’s identity.
“The last human from Earth...?”
“That’s right.”
“Earth was destroyed five hundred years ago, wasn’t it? How are you still alive? Did you go into cryosleep or something?”
Even for cryosleep, five hundred years. Was that possible? The captain reined in the flood of questions.
“I’ll explain that slowly as well. First, the reason Aegis destroyed your planet.”
“Ah...”
“They aren’t only destroying Earth. They’re destroying every planet that carries on Earth’s lineage.”
Even as he looked at this man, a human from a world destroyed five centuries ago, as something alien, thoughts of Aegis spread through his head. Of all the countless species, why were they so brutal specifically to Terran humanity?
“What did we do wrong to make Aegis angry?”
“Nothing wrong. Aegis hates us one-sidedly.”
“What does that mean?”
“They want humanity descended from Earth erased from the whole universe.”
Luca’s eyes shook uncontrollably. At the fact that the tragedy he was living through had been Aegis’s unilateral decision, the anger he’d left to sit came surging up.
“Why... why on earth...?”
The captain answered the murmured question quietly.
“They think humanity is too much of a threat.”
He reached toward the holographic device and slowly rotated the blue shape of the Earth.
“Humanity kept developing in directions the higher intelligences that rule Aegis didn’t want.”
The spinning Earth broke into fragments in his hand and scattered throughout the quarters. One of the pieces changed its name. Terra-Eremos-09. The place that had been Luca’s home.
“We swapped diseased organs out for machines and extended our lifespans. Later we tore up the environments of entire planets and rebuilt them to our taste. Like your home, Terra-Eremos-09. Aegis felt threatened, certain that at this rate humanity would rule the whole universe.”
Facilities that could supply water without shortage on a planet that saw fewer than twenty days of rain a year. Technology that let a man or a woman bear a child alone. Even a collective mode of thought that spread theology among people in a spacefaring society at the pinnacle of science.
Even to Luca’s mind, the people of his home world, with their superb science, had seemed more organized than other high-intelligence aliens. Organized enough to worry the ruling class of the galactic alliance.
“Earth was their first example. And then the second, the third, every frontier humanity had set foot on. They destroyed all of them.”
The captain switched off the hologram. The room filled again with the dim color of cosmic dust. In that stillness, Luca drew a deep breath.
The heavy scent of juniper drove all the way into his lungs. Was the reason he loved it that the blood of those long-ago Earth people, running in him too, missed its home?
The naivety of crying because machine arms and legs frightened him was wiped away, and what remained was anger, contempt for Aegis’s one-sided slaughter.
“...So I was just one of the vermin they had to wipe out, then.”
The captain answered the self-mockery as if it were the most natural thing.
“You’re the Terran that Aegis is most frantic to hunt down.”
“...Aegis considers someone like me special?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re Luca.”
“What’s that supposed to mean...?”
“It means you’re bound very closely to me.”
The explanation about Earth had at least been within the realm of comprehension. Nothing about the talk of himself and the captain was. Even Luca, who didn’t consider himself slow, couldn’t pick up the thread of this conversation.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mm, shall I break it down a little more?”
“Mm...”
“I’m the last Earthling. The being that grates on Aegis’s eye more than anything else. And the one bound closest to me is you. Do you think they could leave you alone?”
Broken down or not, Luca’s face said he still couldn’t accept it. That the captain was the last Earthling left, he’d understood. But once his own existence as ‘Luca’ became the center of the story, his head went into disorder.
Aegis was hunting him. Because they believed he was connected to the man in front of him, Captain Luka.
...Why?
Unable to keep the question filling his head inside any longer, Luca spoke.
“What relationship do you and I have?”
Short, labored breaths mixed into the asking voice.
“Haa, am I someone important to you or something? Hah...”
Breath coming tight, in and out, Luca finally dropped his head. However he gasped, the air wouldn’t draw down into the depths of his lungs. Mild hyperventilation.
“Oh no...”
The captain came close and took Luca’s shoulder in long, firm fingers. He wasn’t thrown by the wheezing, hissing breaths.
Luca lying on the medical bay bed, screaming as though convulsing and then gasping for air, was one of the symptoms he’d watched more than any other.
“The stress seems severe. I’ll stop talking, so breathe out slowly, and in.”
