(Near Completion.)

Pass the Word

by

Mark Fairchild

© 2010, Mark Fairchild, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

The mayor had died in his sleep. The news had brought the Herrington Herald Night Desk to life!

It also could not have happened at a better time for Dhamir Jameson, who was filling in for both the Night Desk Chief and Assistant Night Desk Chief who were, respectively, out of commission due to the former being in  surgery and the latter being out of town.

Dhamir had just returned to work two weeks previously. He had been on a leave of absence during the latter part of his wife's struggle with cancer, and then her death and its aftermath. He could not just fold up and die, as he wished. He loved his wife, but he had to carry on in this world. At least the utility companies, banks, and tax collectors said so.

Fortunately he loved his work too, and that love now beckoned to him. He had to respond; one can mourn only so long before it becomes morose in a deep and abiding way. Dhamir saw this and tried to move on, but it was a slow process.

It was now 2 a.m. and a few groggy reporters were beginning to arrive to pick up their assignments, to get a head start on a special edition planned for that afternoon. The plan was beginning to take shape, but the process was neither easy nor fast.

It was in the midst of this insanity that Dhamir looked up to see an old high school chum, Sam Everton, walk in the front door. Dhamir waved and came over to say his howdys to Dhamir. It had initially taken a few seconds before Dhamir recognized him. The man before him looked half his age, a good 25 years younger than he would have expected a classmate to look.

"Sam! Good to see ya; you look so . . . so young! You must've joined the Navy,” Dhamir said, acknowledging the age discrepancy that could only be accounted for by relativistic travel.

“Aye, sir,” Sam replied in a rather campy manner. “Eight years a'fore the mast.”

While it was nice to see Sam, it was a distraction Dhamir could not afford at that moment.

"Let's go get some coffee," Sam offered. He obviously assumed that all the activity at two in the morning was normal for a newspaper office.

Dhamir laughed to himself. "It's not really a good time. How 'bout tomorrow evening, say 'round nine? . . . in the evening.

"Well. . . if you want . . . but I think you would really prefer to talk now."

Something in Sam's intonation—and his lingering emphasis on the word “prefer”—led Dhamir to think that it might just be true; that he might, professionally, regret waiting. That Sam might know something about the shooting. Two o'clock in the morning is an odd time to show up at a newspaper without a news lead, even for an old high school buddy. So now he had an excruciating decision to make. It was a gamble, and his editing career was at stake. How to decide?

"You know we aren't normally this busy. There's big news breaking that we gotta cover. In detail. And fast."

"I know, or I guessed" Sam replied. "Your mayor was just . . . 'hacked up.'"

That did it! Even Dhamir did not know this much. The police were being very tight-lipped, even misleading; so how did Sam know? Yes, that made it worth the gamble of losing his chance at a better career. In fact this might make his career—a scoop! He had to know what happened to the mayor, and Sam seemed to know. Possibly.

He promptly granted a battlefield promotion to an especially talented copy editor, making him acting Assistant Night Desk Chief. He then left with Sam, after making sure the new Desk Chief was oriented and had his communications “node code” if he needed to contact Dhamir.

There were not many places in at two in the morning where one 

could sit and talk over coffee; in fact, there was only one, Morningside Café. This made Morningside the worst place possible to sit and talk. They had not been inside ten seconds before three people had asked, "What's going on over at the Mayor's house, Dhamir?" And Dhamir was obliged to say, "Don't really know yet; when we do know you'll get it all in the paper." Dhamir and Sam decided to talk as they walked.

After some two minutes of catching up on the minor stuff, Dhamir said with an ever-so-slight overtone of bitterness, "OK, Sam, you know how busy it is tonight, and how tremendously important this story is to my future. Such as is left of it. So what d'ya know?"

Sam tensed with a hurt look for about five seconds, at which point the stress that lay behind Dhamir's question became too painfully obvious. "I am sorry," he said. "I should have found a better way to do this." He studied Dhamir's face for some hint of forgiveness and finding nothing but intense curiosity, he continued. "I was with your Mayor when he was killed."

Dhamir thought his eyes must have bugged out in astonishment, but in fact, only one eyebrow lifted in a journalistic “yes, go on.” After twenty-five years on the beat, his face was well-trained.

"Well, I was not exactly with him, but I was in the next room, and I saw it happen." He stared at the passing sidewalk cracks until Dhamir said, again, "go on," in a manner that some journalists have that makes a command sound like gentle compassion.

"I knew Dave from the Navy. We served together on the PE-DSNV Hunter. He was a Cook. I was an Engine Specialist."

Dhamir had not known much about the Mayor's naval career. He knew there was one, and that actual, interstellar, relativistic space travel had been involved. Not only had the mayor said so in his campaigns, but he had been born 98 years ago, yet appeared to be in his mid thirties. Relativistic space travel wreaked havoc with personal and social time lines for most people. Dhamir did not, however, know the details of the mayor's Naval service; no one in town knew, not really. Except, apparently, Sam.

Sam continued, "I was in town. I had just arrived at 10:30 . . . I guess it was last night, now. I was looking at stuff at the depot when I saw Dave was the mayor here. If you knew Dave 23 years ago, you would know how hilarious that is! So I stopped over to harass him a bit about that and about his moving to my hometown!"

"10:30, you say?" Dhamir asked. He wondered about Sam's speech. No contractions, few idioms—had he heard any at all? Much precision, however.

He paused to study Dhamir's face a bit closer, asking himself whether he ought to trust him much further. Sam still had time to change his story and let this whole incident blow over. But he wasn't.

Sam said, "Ah, can we kind o' keep this all off the record?" Dhamir decided to trust him. He had something to hide, and he knew that Dhamir knew it. That made him trustworthy. Provisionally.

"Oh, sure." Sam could always use his certainty of what actually happened to pry the “official” story out of the police.

"Thanks. . . . Maybe I will change my mind after I catch my breath, so to speak. It is all just happening so fast."

"That's fine," Dhamir said, not quite sure what to make of any of “it” yet. He only knew that he had what might have been the only eye witness to the murder in his hands. And he was a friend. Even if this did not help him tonight, the truth certainly would, whether Sam was the source or not. "So what happened?"

"Well, we sat at his home and had some drinks."

Dhamir interrupted. "Stop right there. Have you told the police about this?"

"No, I got out of there fast. I would have made a good second target! For that matter, I would make a good primary suspect as well."

"OK, but you know you had to 'ave left all sorts of evidence that you were there. You need to find them before they decide to find you! If you know who did this, you gotta get that info to the cops. Right away. He . . . it was a 'he' wasn't it?” Sam nodded. “He could travel hundreds of miles while we take our time walking!”

“Trust me,” Sam said. “That will not happen. I know the guy, and I know right where he is and will be. I will talk to them, but I have to catch my breath. Maybe if we walk over there, to the police department, and I can explain to you what happened on the way."

That made it about a thirty-minute walk, and Dhamir could always call the office for a ride back.

Reluctantly, Sam said, “OK." Then to himself, Back to work in over an hour—tonight. Maybe making my career will end my career! 'The scoop that came too late.'

Sam started up, "It was good to see Dave. As I said, we had been on the PedSnov [Navy-speak for PE-DSNV] Hunter together; but it was definitely unusual . . . how we parted ways. Dave was a pretty level headed guy, but . . . he had a drinking problem.”

Dhamir asked, “What did you talk about? Maybe something that would shed some light on who might'a done this too him?”

“Well, maybe. We mostly talked about a nasty incident on ProELF-A1 (short for Procy-A-ELF-1. It means Procyon-A's first Earth Life Friendly planet.)”

Dhamir smiled and said, “I know: I am a reporter.”

Sam smiled too. “We were on ProELF-A1 sampling the local 'fermented cuisine' with a bunch of other off-duty enlisted men from our ship when an odd alien fellow came up to us and laid down this truly strange proposition."

Sam stopped talking and his eyes went unfocused and glazed over slightly. Eventually, Dhamir prodded him, “go on."

Sam stirred. "Sorry. Are you ever plagued with 'what ifs?'"

"Of course, aren't we all?"

"Perhaps, but I have to wonder. . . well, anyway. This native fellow came up to our table and asked if we were with PENS,” Sam looked at Dhamir then said quickly, “(Planet Earth Naval Service),“ and continued.“ We, of course, said 'yes.'

"Is that your shuttle out there," he asked.

"Yeah."

'How would you like to make some money' he asked."

"We should have known better. We knew it would be a week in the brig if we were caught hiring out PENS property for our own uses, but we were just kids. What the hell, we thought. They don't pay us enough for all the crap we put up with: the months going crazy in a stupid aluminum can in space, kow-towing to jerks who would be selling French Fries if they had not lucked out and become masters of that aluminum universe. And everyone in it."

Dhamir said, "I thought you were put in suspended animation during relativistic flight. Isn't sleep all you have to 'put up with'? That's not so bad."

"Well, yeah, during interstellar, relativistic flight they do that. But they want to keep your reflexes in shape, so even during interstellar travel you take shifts 'space dreaming.' You'd be two months watching half the crew sleep while you simulate attacks, and various tactical and strategic problems, take recorded classes on all sorts of stuff, play chess, and surf a web that is years out of date, ogling glamor girls that, in some cases, might well have already died of extended old age. You get the idea. A week in the brig would be worth it for a little unscripted excitement, we thought."

"So you went with this guy."

"Yes. We had no idea just how bad an idea it could be. How bad it was going to be. 'One week in the brig wouldn't be that bad,' we kept telling ourselves. Yeah, well, this time it was that bad, with your conscience as a cellmate."

Dhamir gave him the get-on-with-it look.

"OK. So the guy offers us a ridiculous amount of cash if we would fly him and his friends to this place so they could deliver some freight, then fly them back. Nothing illegal . . . aside from using PEN property to do it. But they needed to deliver it faster than local transport could handle.

"'Sure,' we said, swaggering more than a bit.

"So we went outside with him. He seemed like a nice enough fellow. We flew him in the shuttle to some place that served as a warehouse, and he got about ten fair sized crates. He and five of his friends loaded them onto the shuttle, and then they got on board. He indicated a place on a native map. It took a some time, but we finally figured out how to decipher the . . . gobbledygook . . . on their maps, and off we went. No problem, right? A few more bucks to toss around in poker games during flight.

"Well, when we got to where we were going, everything changed. We came flying in over his destination, and as soon as we looked out the portholes, we knew something was wrong. There below was a huge compound, maybe half a kilometer square, and it was packed with people, with natives, and various shacks and tents and things like that. Some of the “people” sat in groups outside the compound. In retrospect, I would swear I saw some of them outside snarl at the people inside. For us it is hard to decipher alien expressions.

“But it was just such a bizarre sight, those thousands of people crowded into that small space. At least it looked small, with them crammed in like that.

"When we landed and opened the shuttle's portal and got a closer look at the people—at first just the ones outside. Although they were alien, you could somehow tell that they were overjoyed, thankful beyond words to see us; but for what, I wondered. These must be desperately needed medical supplies we had flown in.

“We backed up to let some of the aliens inside the compound come over to help with the supplies.

“But no one inside the compound opened the gate or even moved toward it. They just whispered and shuffled about nervously.”

Sam paused here and that distant look came over him again. But before Dhamir could prompt him, he continued.

“Instead, as the first of the aliens that we had flown in emerged from the shuttle, the ones inside the portal froze. Their expressions turned to terror, and their faces drooped—a common expression of terror in that species. For us, however, the expressions would have been funny in any other context.

“I turned to see that our passengers had managed to toss the five crates out on the ground, where they broke open. Others of their species armed themselves with an assortment of knives, maces, swords, machetes, and any number of wicked looking lethal alien things that spilled out: some primitive, some very high tech. Things we had not seen up to that point.

"I have accused myself ever since. We should have kept an eye on them the entire trip. While we would not have expected in our wildest dreams anything like what happened next, common sense should have said that such strangers might hijack our shuttle, or just kill us and take it. Or God knows what! How could we know! That was when I learned why protocol mattered. But that day . . . we were sloppy and easily distracted, especially when we saw that corral of sentient aliens."

"What did you think it was," Dhamir asked.

"I guess we thought it was a quarantine or something. It seemed like our cargo had to be medicine. It wasn’t big enough to be building materials.

“As soon as we saw our passengers armed with so many lethal weapons, we just froze. They took the opportunity to escape past us. Two of the passengers got out before we found our wits again and tried to stop the other three, but they were armed and we were not. Steve and Dave took the next in line. I took on the one after that. There was a struggle. One of us, Steven, and two of them were killed. The rest of us got cuts and bruises of varying severity, but nothing too severe.

“Then we began to wonder just what the hell we had done, as we watched the armed mob approach the compound gate. We irrationally rationalized that maybe they were after just one person.

“That rationalization was smashed when they opened the gate. All those people sitting around in groups outside the enclosure, there must have been several hundred, revealed weapons similar to the more primitive ones our passengers had brought. Our passengers carried, and used surprisingly effectively, the higher tech weapons. They flooded in through the gate, and an all out massacre started.

"God, Dhamir. . . I swear to God we had no idea that what we were doing was anywhere near that bad.

Dhamir stood looking at Sam in the streetlight under the stars. He finally decided that he believed him. Sam's tears were very real. He shook his head. "God, Sam. What happened to you and your shipmates?" he asked.

"Ha," he said without humor, "we were tossed in the brig just as we had expected to be. But not for a sleep week, or a thawed week, but for a thawed year.

“We didn't argue, not a one of us. We did not take part in the massacre—in fact, we saved about a dozen people from it—but . . . well, we inadvertently started it: we apparently took the leaders there, armed many of them, and just stood there like the damn fool kids we were while thousands of them screamed to us for help. At least thirty thousand of them were killed there. I know it was not our fault, but what would they say? Without us, it might not have happened. We all felt we deserved worse than that year in the brig."

"No doubt," agreed Dhamir. "No offense."

"Our childishness led to a genocide. Do you understand, Dhamir? A real, total genocide."

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," started Dhamir.

"No, it was literally a genocide. And not just an attempted genocide, such as happened in Germany, Rwanda, the Sudan, Glimdol, or Gliese-667-C ELF 3 and such. I watched while they actually eliminated the entire gene pool of those poor people that day. In that enclosure was virtually every remaining member of the R'aste race."

"Good Lord, an entire race" muttered Dhamir.

"Did I say 'race'? I should have said 'species'. At a glance, it was hard for us to tell the Statste and R'aste apart. They looked so alike, but they were not. The R'aste was a distinct, sentient species, with a unique culture and never to be known hopes and dreams. There were two sentience species on that planet. Now there is only one.”

Dhamir's gasp was simply silence. "Why did we not hear about this? I never saw it come across the wires."

"Think about it, Dhamir. The Navy's budget comes from your pockets. Besides, you did hear about it. The planet was ProELF-A1, but the Navy said it was Begia-ELF-3."

"Dhamir's eyes widened, for real. "The Begia incident?"

"Yes," Sam said. "That was me. Me and your mayor and three others."

Dhamir tranced for a bit, then shook his head, as if to chase away a fly. "So, fascinating as this is. . . by the way, could I get your story on the record later?"

"Ask me that tomorrow. Who knows what will have happened between now and then."

"Ah, yes. Well, keep me in mind please."

"OK, I can certainly do that," said Sam.

"So, what does all that have to do with all this?" Dhamir put on his perplexed look, though he had an inkling.

Sam stopped and looked at the stars above. "I said I know who killed Dave. Well, I should say that I have a pretty good idea. And this someone has to pay; or rather has to be stopped. He has  been trailing us—the Terrans and the R'aste who survived—for just that reason."

"The R'aste? I thought none survived,” said Dhamir.

“No, A handful of individuals survived, but the gene pool did not.”

“How's that,” Dhamir asked.

Sam simply looked away, his eyes tearing up, too choked up to speak. Dhamir let that line go for the time being.

“Maybe your pursuers are the aliens who got you into this" Sam suggested.

Sam, sighed and focused on Dhamir's new train of thought. "Maybe," he replied. "But not necessarily. The Staste, that is the name of their species, were the ones who were with us on the shuttle. The Staste are almost certainly behind the deaths of the R'aste survivors who escaped on the shuttle. But it could be just about anyone who has been pursuing me and my Navy buddies.

"Our actions brought about the genocide—soon to be total genocide—of the R'aste. It could be some Staste who cared about them and think this is a good way to show that they still care. Or it could be some individual R'aste who managed to escape the massacre somehow or never were caught and imprisoned, or maybe played dead and escaped the massacre that way. But I doubt it. The R'aste culture was extremely pacifist. I suppose it could be a Staste who is out for vengeance on the Terrans who killed their loved one on the shuttle during the scuffle as he disembarked at the compound. It could even be some Terrans who want to eliminate the scuzzballs that sullied the name of Earth. I just don't know for sure."

"But some one definitely wanted Dave dead," said Dhamir.

"Not necessarily," said Sam. "Dave was just a cook. He was with us when the Staste first approached us. He stayed behind, so he wasn’t even really involved in the incident. Although he did not argue against us going."

"So, again, what has that to do with this?"

"They have been following me and trying to kill me ever since I was released from the service. They might have discovered that Dave was on the Hunter at the time. They seem to consider every single person on the Hunter as being culpable for our actions on the shuttle. Because we were all from the Hunter. And the Hunter brought the shuttle. And that brought the weapons.

“Just as likely they might be angry that Dave did not try to stop us."

Dhamir raised both eyebrows and frowned.

Sam explained, "For a long time I thought about who might be doing this. It is an alien mind we are talking about here. For them association is unity. We brought the killers and their weapons to the compound and the Hunter brought us to the killers; quite logical, according to their form of logic. More importantly, we said 'yes' to the killers. That cements association as unity. That kind of makes sense even for us. Kind of. But even if it is alien-think, it is still valid, if only for them."

Silence fell on the two of them while they thought it over. Eventually, Dhamir asked, "Well, what did you see in the mayor's house? And what exactly do these aliens look like?"

"They look enough like us that it takes very little makeup to complete the similarity. They use their muscles differently. For instance, they smile with their nose rather than with their mouth. They tend to be born with more upturned noses as a result. It makes them look more friendly, in their cultures.

"As for what I saw at Dave's house. . ." He paused for quite some time and Dhamir did not interrupt his pause. "I saw from the rear an image I had seen too many times on ProELF-A1. I saw a human, or humanoid, figure raise a machete and sink it into Dave's neck. It severed his spinal column immediately. Dave died quickly and painlessly."

"And why didn't you do anything to stop this?"

Sam looked at Dhamir long and hard. It seemed to Dhamir, for a moment, that the question might have made him an enemy. Until he saw tears.

At long last Sam smiled, stood up and said, "I did. I did do something."

"What," Dhamir asked.

Another pause, and more tears. "I killed Dave."

"But I thought you said the alien had already killed him."

"He had," said Sam. "Everything I have told you is true, with one small exception. It does not take just a little makeup for a Staste to look like a human. They are chameleons.” He paused, then shook his head. “We are chameleons. It takes only a little DNA and some time, fifty minutes to be exact, for their bodies to process it and to then begin to morph into the creature coded in the DNA."

Dhamir was dismayed and more than a little worried. He immediately understood the implications. Or most of them.

“It also takes just a couple of hundred milliliters or so of cortex taken from just the right part of the brain and 'ingested,' for want of a better word in your language, to acquire things like memories and personalities.

'Sam' continued. "Your Sam died at my hands two of your weeks ago. Then last night Dave, your Mayor, died at my hands. I thought it best that he not rise from the dead, but I was seen at the scene of the murder so I did not ingest his DNA. Instead, I sought you out."

"And we shook hands a little over half an hour ago," Dhamir said.

"Yes," the creature replied as the morphing began. The bones of its skeleton were the first to change, altering size to better resemble Dhamir.

Dhamir lurched but was grabbed by a firm, strong, and morphing hand. He was lifted, then placed very authoritatively on a park bench beside the sidewalk.

"What are you going to do with me?” Dhamir asked.

“Do not worry,” the alien said. He spoke with a bit more effort now. “You will be free to go shortly. And I do not want your memories or personality, so your brain is safe. But, I do want you to tell the story I just told to you. Meanwhile, I will find my way out of town and back to a spaceport to make my way home."

Dhamir was stammering on the inside, but only let silence show on the outside. Once the query was composed in his mind he asked, "But why?"

"I am R'aste, one of seven males to survive the massacre. He paused, looking intently at Dhamir.

“And there are no females that survived.” He paused again, letting the implication set in.

“Our species is dead. We seven are no more than ghosts. We have set about destroying those who destroyed us. We are the rage of a sentient species that was eradicated."

"But we did nothing to you," Dhamir barely whispered.

"No, you did not; but the officers and crew of the PE-DSNV Hunter did. No one ever told you, and it must be told. You are one who can tell. After all, you are a Teller. Sam was the last of the shuttle crew, and he is now dead. They have paid. Now remains the very few Terrans who knew of our plight and still allowed such irresponsible idiots to have control of a shuttle on a world they did not understand, and those who knew what happened, but did nothing about it.

“Many Staste have yet to pay, in the few years we have, we remaining R'aste Ghosts will pursue them.

"Our revenge, our alien revenge," he emphasized the word 'alien', is our alien concern, not yours. It is no longer yours; it belongs to the Ghosts. That no law, no god can deny us."

“I . . . we . . . task you with the Telling of our story. You will find background material on our species and what led to our demise in your desk.

“It could so easily have been averted.”

"But . . ." Dhamir began.

The alien cut him off. For the first time it lost its temper and screamed at him, "ENOUGH! You have sufficient information to get you started. If you need more, then you will find a way to get more. So enough now.“

"You Terrans are relatively new to space. You still do not accept that you are responsible for your adventures and misadventures on other worlds."

The transformation was complete. Dhamir was now looking at Dhamir.

The alien Dhamir said, "You can make this universe a better place or a worse place. Try to understand it, and explain it to your species before this happens again. Understand, you are either a . . . your language does not have any good expression for this, which scares me. You are either a force for blessedness, or you are nothing more than a destructive energy that must be eliminated. For your own good, your species must understand this.

“For my part . . . I suspect the police will discover the truth of what happened, or enough clues to guess, and they will either decide to go silent about it, or be told to go silent by PEN. They will not learn any lesson from this. But your species might. If you tell them. You might save countless other species over the coming millennia.”

With that Dhamir watched himself walk away, never to be seen again.

***

Dhamir, the real Dhamir, returned to his desk and pondered what to do. Unless the police came up with some evidence that connected this murder to an alien killer, it would be difficult for him to provide new evidence without any proof other than his word. The word of an aging reporter stuck in a dead-end job would not be trusted all that much.

In the end he wrote the story of the Mayor's murder as best he could given the evidence the police provided, and they had a lot of evidence, or so they claimed. It all made for a good story, which Dhamir knew was a complete, total, and utter lie.

Dave's wife had babbled something about a person they identified as Sam Everton, but they soon determined that Sam Everton had been killed in a city a thousand miles away and two weeks before the Herrington murder—hacked up like Dave, but with part of his brain missing. Police detectives do not give much credence to ghosts. They followed the lead, in case the two murders were related, but as a lead to the killer's identity, it was quickly abandoned. It was filed and forgotten.

The final account was that the mayor was murdered and that other than that, not much could be said. The special edition was published, but without saying much about the murder itself. That came out in bits and pieces over the next few months. Confusing bits and pieces.

Eventually, they found some small-time crook who they arrested for the murder. He rested in jail while detective work and court paperwork proceeded. Officials made sure it took time. Months. In the end, he was released due to lack of credible evidence. By that time the anger had died down. Everyone knew that after that much time had elapsed, any other killer's trail had gone cold.

***

This whole episode energized Dhamir's anger. He felt more alive than at any time since Melinda's death. And oddly enough, her last words, directed at the cancer cells that were then overwhelming her body's systems, drove him on more than anything. “We can't let them win, Dhamir.” 'Oddly' because she meant they could not let the cancer destroy Dhamir too. But it now became a mantra with its own new meaning.

He had a mission, which trumps any career. He began research for a book on the massacre on Procy-A-ELF-1, and when it began to absorb too much of his time he resigned his job at the paper.

Alien Sam was right. The authorities were stonewalling about entire aspects of the incident, refusing to accept any kind of responsibility, insisting Dhamir had his facts wrong, it was Begia ELF 3 he was thinking of, not Procy-ELF-A1. Dhamir had to nurture native sources on Procy-A-ELF-1 (necessitating relativistic travel) to get any information indicating that the incident might have actually happened.

Eventually, years later and many more years for his readers, the book was written: In the Jaws of the Little Dog. He was able to pour all of his grief and rage into writing the book. He helped market it as much as he could. But it did not sell many copies, and still, Terrans continued to bang around the universe, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, shattering cultures as they went.

In researching the book he found that all of the humans, and Staste aboard the Hunter's shuttle that fateful day had indeed died, most of them brutally murdered. But since the last one died, Herrington's Mayor, no other member of the Herrington's crew had died under suspicious circumstances. The Ghosts of Procy-A ELF 1 had fed their specie's rage until the rage, and the avengers had died. Apparently.

Humans, however, barely noticed it. They continued to shatter anything, any culture, any biosphere they did not understand or have an abiding care for. It might be, Dhamir realized, "that the human species as a whole is the real problem, not just its actions.  "What we don't care for we destroy, or we allow it to be destroyed."

Our concern, he thought, "ought to be that some species' vengeance-seeking ghosts might come along sometime and solve THAT problem." 

Dhamir, however, could not grieve for the human species, of which he was a part. How can one grieve for the shameless?

The End