While Earth Sleeps...

Flash science fiction inspired by a line from Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet"

General Bruce Wilkinson of Tiger Rock Communications HQ adjusted his headset and paused before initiating uplink with the asteroid cleanup crew commissioned to K42. He was the highest ranking at the communications facility but he certainly wasn’t the most well trained man for the task of telling others the exact date and time to the very splittest of seconds, that they will die.

“Volture 9, this is General Bruce Wilkinson - do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, General. What is our status?”

“Enemy combat fleet heading in a trajectory towards your ship at full warp, Captain. You have three days.”

“Three... days, General? Until what?”

Hearing the word ‘day’, the Captain’s mind was jolted with a spark of fleeting memories, of Earthly sunshine and waking up to the scent of spiced porridge at his foster home in California. He smiled, though he did not quite know why. The Captain of Volture 9 had not heard the word since he was a young man, having been relocated to the pilot training program on Tiger Rock - an extrasolar dusk-planet - 25 light years from Earth.

The Tiger Fist War Council had banned such words and countless other no-longer-relevant naming conventions from the lexicon of all military personnel on duty as well as in private life. This had mixed social side-effects, of course, but the Council, which comprised distinguished professors in military strategy, astrophysics, philosophy and intergalactic relations, had spent over fifteen years researching and drafting new communications protocols that would improve accuracy, response times and ultimately, military efficiency.

General Wilkinson knew he was risking his career by abandoning communications protocol. But there was one thing Wilkinson had learnt about protocol and it was that silently woven into the fabric of every military rule there was a hidden protocol. A protocol that, under certain circumstances, made it imperative to disregard all protocol. 

 

“There is nothing we can do for you. We have no combat fleets within interception range and we have already lost Volture 3 and 4 to this offensive. You have three days to live, Captain.”

“What do you mean three days? How long is three days in this galaxy?”

“You don’t need to spend your last seconds watching a countdown timer. All that is important to you and your men now is that you know you will shortly no longer exist. Now I’ve told you much more than you are authorized to know and, well... much less than I wished I could. I am sorry, Captain... Goodbye.”

An hour before the first photon beams tore the ship’s armor to space shrapnel, Volture 9 Captain James Parker lay down in his sleeping pod and smiled one last time. He had just remembered a line from a poem he had read back on Earth. It was the poem that had brought him here, and the poem that would see him off forever.

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the Earth sleeps we travel.”

Reviews

[Lilly Negoi]

lovely quote :). and i think you did quite a good job in the way you included it here.
"you don’t have to walk a golden path
for your feet to feel under the steps you take
the blessings of a never-ending journey…"

welcome to the cafe :) i hope you enjoy your time here ;)

[Kerry O'Connor]

"Even while the Earth sleeps we travel" - a grand conclusion to your tale. Your narrative tells a very interesting part of a whole story - I like the flashbacks, which contextualize the present setting.

Thank you for participating in the November Prose contest.

[roarke]

It's always interesting to me where to include quotes, as prologues, woven in the middle, as epilogue, etc. or do they need to be included at all? It's interesting here, a moment, that there's no conflict, only an acceptance of the situation. The emphasis of Protocol, it's influence on the Captain's decisions needs a bit more connection.
Over all this is an intimate portrait of humanity in space, all the ugly and beauty and fragility. You took something in the middle, suggested a beginning and prophesied an end, quite an accomplishment.

[Chris]

I like the perceived intent... and how you wove my perceptions.

Chris