Greatness, and How I Achieved It
by David Barber
There was an element of luck in the way Captain Henry Walker’s microfleet ambushed and destroyed the Jirt templeship, though humankind’s eventual reckoning was only postponed as the Jirt crusaders paused to find themselves a more successful god.
After the battle, Walker’s command pod returned what was left of him in a cryotank.
* * *
From the moment Henry elbowed me aside to get born first, I have found myself in his shadow. He was always the favoured one, while I was the sidekick in our childhood games, an also-ran in any competition. Even when the War began and I was conscripted to Salmud, Henry was already rising through the ranks of Fleet.
But enough of Henry.
My name is George Walker, and Salmud must be the most unpleasant planet in human space. It is waterless, barren and the few women here have no taste for men. It is a world of rock and metal, with one or other of its scorching suns always overhead. Human life endures in caverns which lack any of the comforts of civilisation.
* * *
“What state’s he in?” asked the Officer from Fleet.
The medic frowned. “Well, the pod’s salvage program discarded the damaged lower half and froze what was left.”
“But can he be saved?”
The medic shrugged. “I assumed these emergency systems were just a gimmick to boost morale. Salvage isn’t really cost effective.”
“Captain Walker’s a hero. We need him back.”
* * *
Dig here, our geologists instruct, and columns of workers dig. Crush and leach the pitchblende so, say chemical engineers, and the residue humans call yellowcake is extracted. Hives blessed with uranium ore grow rich and become buyers of sought-after human technology, though their workers die in droves.
But still, it is George Walker, not those experts, loitering underground and safe from the scouring ultra-violet, who must cajole hive Queens into doing our bidding.
Let me be clear, my contribution to the war effort on this appalling world has never been acknowledged.
* * *
“What’s the delay?” the Fleet Officer wanted to know. This hiatus in the War wouldn’t last forever.
His gaze kept being drawn to the contents of the tank, where a pale shape floated in a tangle of tubes and wires.
“Well, his legs are growing nicely, but the germ-line tissue isn’t stable.”
The medic caught the blank look. “His testicles. Cancerous.”
The Fleet Officer began to feel queasy.
“His sex-life isn’t an issue. We need him back on his feet.”
* * *
I was not born to greatness, nor have I achieved it, though I still have hopes of it being thrust upon me. A prestigious award for my heroic efforts in Resource Management, you say?
But of course, Henry would not be impressed. He pretends modesty, but Mother keeps his medals on display.
In my early years, I imagined rescuing him from bullies or fierce alien creatures. He would stutter his thanks and apologise for everything, though even in my daydreams that never rang true.
I suppose one must find comfort where one can, and at least Salmud is far from any actual fighting. They also serve who only wait for the next relief ship.
* * *
This time it was a different officer. She bore an ominous EarthSec hologram on her brow. The medic hurried to explain about the repeated retroviral outbursts. After all, Walker had been soaked in hard radiation. They had discarded everything below the fifth cervical vertebrae and started again.
“I did explain salvage isn’t really cost effective—”
The EarthSec officer interrupted. “Remember the Jirt warhead that got through?”
The medic groped for a safe answer.
“It was an infective device. So we ablated India. Cauterised it. Us. Earth Security.”
The medic swallowed.
“We give the orders now, so get him ready to face the Jirt. Understood?”
* * *
In fact the next ship to stop at Salmud wasn’t an automated U-hauler or some antiquated freighthull, but the Empire-class Jumpship Roman, pulled at short notice from the battle group patrolling Kruger 60.
Fleet Admiral Diamond gave an away team three hours to bring George Walker aboard, and they made it with eleven minutes to spare. George protested he’d done nothing wrong, that they couldn’t do this, that he knew his rights. It was obvious he must have done, they could, and he had none. In the shuttle they talked over and across him, the servos of their monstrous battle armour whining and hissing. He made himself small, fearful he might be accidentally squashed.
Roman was already boosting sunwards as George was frogmarched onto the Bridge. With a crash of metal boots, they left him in front of the Admiral’s empty chair. George looked about the Bridge where a sun swelled on the screens and a voice counted down to Jump.
“Uncanny likeness,” said the short, wide man in Fleet black and silver. He dropped into the Admiral’s chair and rubbed his brutal haircut. “Your twin’s a hero. Sacrificed everything for victory. Almost everything.”
“Well, good old Henry.”
“He’s the reason we have this ceasefire,” snapped the Admiral. “First time the Jirt have wanted to parley, but only on condition that they speak to him.”
Warnings began to chime around the Bridge as the sun overflowed the screens and filters repeatedly ramped down the brightness. They needed to be dangerously close to swap stellar energies for the vast improbability of the Jump.
“Can I ask where you’re taking me?”
The Admiral lowered his voice. “We’re losing this War.”
“Should you be telling me that?”
The Admiral’s face glowed with sunlight. “Our best hope is to negotiate a truce, to give us time to rebuild.”
The countdown reached single figures.
“Don’t we need drugs? Because I was comatose through all the jumps to Salmud and—”
“Can’t jump into hostile space with your crew taking a nap,” growled the Admiral. “What do you think the funnels are for?”
Jump hit them like a thunderclap.
Some of the Bridge crew didn’t even throw up. Even those who used the suction funnels didn’t look away from their screens. Any low-entropy system was subject to jump sickness, to spasmodic neuron firing and the flipping of binary bits at random. Trained spacers recovered faster than majority-voting computers. Neither did as well as the Jirt. Another reason the War was going badly.
George didn’t find a funnel. And he burst into tears. It felt like he’d left his soul behind. There was clearing-up to be done and much contempt for civs. For spacers, a life-long interest in tattoos, drinking, and foul language, together with a lack of empathy were pretty much essential. Playing with big, slam-bang ordnance was just a perk of the job.
The Admiral took George into his stateroom and poured him a stiff drink.
“Why am I here?” sniffed George. How did spacers cope? He’d felt like a baby dumped into ice water, as if his brain had been scraped raw.
“Because the Jirt will speak only to your twin and he’s still recovering from his injuries.”
“Send someone else then. The Jirt can’t possibly know what Henry looks like.”
“That was what we thought, but they wouldn’t speak to our man. Officer Chen here thought on her feet and told them we suspected a trap, and that the real Henry Walker was being kept safe.”
The Admiral stared at the Earth Sec officer. “A risky tactic.”
Chen spoke up. “Somehow they knew he was an impostor.”
She had small, hard features, a small, hard body and a small, hard soul.
The Fleet Admiral had his own theory. “Telepathy.”
Chen shook her head. “Scientists think that’s impossible, Admiral.”
George wiped his eyes. The brandy had helped. “Henry was always the brave one.” George had slipped from existential to maudlin. “Even as a child, he—”
“We’ve just given Einstein the finger and jumped seven lights, Chen. Who knows what ‘impossible’ means?”
Chen turned back to George. “Your brother’s craft was probably scanned during the battle. And you are genetically identical to him.”
“Henry’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No, but perhaps we were overhasty. When your brother woke and found he was just—”
Chen’s lips bent into a small, hard smile: “He lost his head.”
George blew his nose loudly. “I’ll be alright now.”
* * *
The Roman raced to get to Fomalhaut ahead of the Jirt. There was a second Jump, for which George was wisely drugged. He was coming round when they slammed into a vicious 3-g deceleration burn. There wasn’t time to fix his nosebleed properly, and Chen paced impatiently while a medtech wadded gauze up George’s nose.
Fomalhaut was a disputed system: humans were eager to mine its planetary disc, the Jirt wanting to spawn in its solitary jovian. Inconclusive battles had been fought here, but this was where the Jirt had insisted the meeting take place.
“We have a script of sorts.” Chen waved the tablet in her hand. “I’d hoped there would be time to prepare you, but since we have no idea what they want, we’ll have to improvise. Just wear this earpiece and say what I tell you.”
The Jirt jumped in with a huge inherent velocity. One thing all Jirt craft had in common was that each looked entirely different. This one resembled a bunch of grapes trailing strands of underwater weeds. It came straight at them.
“Too fast,” remarked a spacer, offhand.
Even George, no veteran of orbital mechanics, was being warned by his primate brain that their paths intersected. The Roman’s software protested. The Jirt should have started braking by now. Megatonnes were being handled carelessly, and alerts spread across the Bridge like a rash. There were distant thuds as doors slammed, segmenting the Roman’s hull.
The alien craft loomed, and George tensed himself for death in combat. He would have liked more time to imagine his obituary.
At the last moment, Jirt physics toyed with inertia, enduring forces that human vessels and bodies could not, and it came to a halt.
“Pussies,” said someone into the silence. “If they’re so tough, how come they didn’t hit us?”
“Roger that,” said another emphatically.
George opened his eyes as a voice rumbled around them, every surface in the Bridge vibrating in a jumble of harmonics: Where is the human that killed god-in-the-world?
“When they say ‘god,’” Chen whispered to the Admiral, “the cognate they use is something like speaker-for-god. Something like interpreter or prophet.”
The Admiral grunted.
“They’ve dropped to background Planck so they can scan us,” reported one of the Bridge crew. “So we’re scanning them.”
On the big screen, the Jirt vessel was a maze of tunnels and cavernous spaces. In those murky depths, under enough pressure to liquefy gases, vast bodies uncoiled and shifted while smaller shapes darted around them.
We sense the human.
“They can’t tell the difference!” crowed the Admiral.
“The human, Walker, is here,” interrupted Chen smoothly.
The human who silenced the voice of god will speak.
Chen chewed at her lip as she flicked through her script, and on the screen something twisted and lashed in the turbid depths.
“I’m no expert,” volunteered George. “But they seem impatient.”
We are isolated from the voice of god. Why is this the case?
Chen murmured in his ear. “Start with a welcome and—”
George cleared his throat. “I think you’ll find that’s what happens when you mess with the human race. In fact—”
Chen clutched his arm, but he pulled free.
“In fact, just because you carry some little tinpot god around doesn’t give you the right—”
Belatedly, Admiral Diamond ordered the coms cut, but the Jirt voice still jangled the air.
It was a false god?
“False? Of course it was false.”
So you destroyed it.
George noticed the horror on Chen’s face.
“Um... not that I don’t respect other people’s beliefs, though now I think of it, that’s exactly your problem.”
There was an appalled silence on the Bridge.
Then it is the case. You will be god-in-the-world.
The Jirt ship began shedding a host of small craft like dandelion seeds.
Perhaps the Roman’s immune response had evolved dangerously close to a hair-trigger, but it had survived when other ships were debris. It automatically pumped up Planck shielding and George began to feel very stupid; thought was replaced by white noise.
“Planck six and rising,” announced a recorded voice.
Give us—
“Planck eight.”
no need—
“Planck nine.”
human.
Nothing with two synapses to rub together could function with probability interference above Planck nine. The Roman’s rail guns began spewing iron pellets at appreciable fractions of c. Even aimed by spacers with half a brain, Jirt craft flared and died.
“Cease—” the Admiral bellowed.
“Not me!” Chen shouted back. Nose to nose they frothed at one another, while around the Bridge, crew gawped at their screens.
“Planck ten!”
Freed from the restraints of sentience, mechanical systems began their well-rehearsed routines. The Roman jerked into violent evasive manoeuvres while rail guns filled volumes of space where the enemy was last detected. Nobody knew how the Jirt handled it, but human ships ran down like clockwork.
Belated return fire from Jirt gravity weapons made the Roman ring like a gong.
“Plan Four!” shouted Admiral Diamond, with the relief of a man finally remembering something that had eluded him.
Again the ship groaned terribly, to the counterpoint of alarms and a voice cheerfully announcing the special of the day.
“Flan Pour!” bawled the Admiral, bundling Chen and George from the Bridge. “Safe. Get him—”
Inside the lift was nice. George watched lights blink downwards until the doors opened again. To his mild surprise, it wasn’t the Bridge but a dead-end facing an open hatch.
Slack-faced, Chen stared at it until some heroic remnant of willpower made her shove George into the escape pod.
After a few hours, he gradually came back to himself. The battle had zigzagged away, and Planck interference dwindled to a faint itch in his brain.
He tried to make sense of the pod’s military-grade interface, but it was beyond him. His twin had flown a microfleet, a swarm of tiny attack craft that behaved like parts of his own body, still partly effective under high Planck interference.
George couldn’t even get the radio to work.
Time passed.
Human, rumbled the air around him, and the instrument lights died. It was like a cloud passing across the sun, everything suddenly dark and cold.
* * *
The Jirt have a curious manner of thought which does not include wanting. I have explained they and I have a destiny elsewhere and humankind is not to be bothered further.
To remind myself, I am George Walker of Earth, onetime wishful thinker, now speaker for someone else’s god.
Sadly, I will never get to savour history’s good opinion of me.
* * *
Earth Sec decided it was a neater, more morale-boosting narrative if Captain Henry Walker, already a hero, was the one who brought an end to the War. No one had ever heard of his twin, so records were easily rectified.
To tidy things up, the medic was informed he’d been right, and salvage wasn’t cost-effective after all.
Copyright © 2025 by David Barber
