Do Unto Others

New Johannesburg was a dump.

Sure, it was my home, and yes, it was the largest colonial city in the Concordance, but it still stank.

A city of a million souls – and some ten million people. Ninety per cent of the city was slums and run-down plascrete shacks, remnants of the First Empire’s colonisation efforts. As on all colony worlds, unemployment was high, and much of the populace occupied itself with petty theft.

All this aside, I was proud of my world and it’s capital. I was a captain in the Planetary Guard (a pretty much obsolete military outfit, for those who don’t know), and the pride pretty much went with the job.

I’d spent eighteen years in the service, steadily working my way up the ranks. Don’t be fooled, I wasn’t slow or stupid (unlike those thugs they call the Colonial Militia). Just content. I wanted to be sure I could shoulder the responsibility at each level of command before I allowed myself the luxury of promotion.

I sighed, a deep moan of boredom. I was standing on the central tower in the Johannesburg barracks; lieutenant McCall stood beside me, coffee mug in hand. He was every bit as bored as I was, and threw me a sympathetic glance. Perhaps a mile away, our monotonous routine was briefly relieved as an aerospace craft lifted up from the spaceport, fusion jets burning with the brightness of a tiny supernova. Wasting no time, its captain piloted his craft upward towards the imperceptible stars.

What happened next was impossible to describe.

All of a sudden, pressure began to build up behind my ears. You know that fuzzy feeling you get sometimes, where your hearing seems to fade and your head starts to throb? Like that, but worse.

A brilliant, blinding curtain of dazzling white shot across the skies, appearing from nowhere and surrounding the entire city in less time than it took to blink. The aerospace freighter was caught by the edge of the curtain and was sheered clean in two; we never saw what happened to the front of it, or it’s captain.

The flickering white curtain spread itself across the landscape like the snows of Terra… but this was no weather; whatever this was, it was totally unnatural, and something I’d never seen before, never even dreamed of.

The blinding light now surrounded the entire city… on every side. Perhaps the curtain even extended below the surface of the planet; deep into the infertile soil of the world. We had no way of telling. Whatever; it was visible in every direction I could see.

People on the streets down below our guard tower screamed in shock… but that was more at the wreckage of the aerospace freighter plunging downwards than anything else. It was just so much dead weight now.

Shit!

A dead weight loaded with tonnes of highly unstable fuel cores. I turned to McCall, screamed into his ear to get down, and hit the deck myself. Not a moment too soon; a second later the freighter completed it’s six thousand-foot drop in record time and crushed the city council building beneath it.

And exploded.

A tremendously bright light, more prominent even than that anomaly which had just surrounded our city, burst from the wreckage. For a moment, there was just that incredible penetrating light, visible even to me, cowering behind the protective walls of the reinforced guard tower. In that moment, an observer could have made out the people in the street, thrown down by the crashing impact of the freighter, blinded by the light and disorientated. Those closest to the light’s source were rendered nearly transparent; their entire internal structure could be made out.

And then the explosion followed that brilliant light, and a shock wave boomed across the city. Those x-ray people closest just disappeared… so did most of the nearby buildings and the ground beneath the freighter. Buildings further away were blown out, reduced to skeletons, or collapsed under their own weight, their foundations reduced to splinters. Vehicles were crushed by falling rubble, flung vast distances by the shock wave, or reduced to scrap metal. As for any civilians or military goons unfortunate enough to be out on the streets… I didn’t want to think about that.

By the time the shock wave hit our guard tower, right on the city perimeter, it had more or less petered out. All the same, the post shook thunderously, and a wall of heat rushed over us. But the reinforced plascrete held. God, I love thee, and your prescient military architects too.

I stood shakily as the last of the blast died away. I leant on the rim of the guard tower for support, and tugged my hand away just as rapidly at the feeling on intense heat. Turning my gaze out to the city, I surveyed the devastation.

‘Whoops,’ I said.

‘I didn’t do it,’ countered McCall, who was now standing besides me, leaning on my shoulder for support. I was about to throw him off when I saw his right leg hanging crazily. Nasty break – blood stained his uniform. Anomaly and catastrophe forgotten in the light of my friend’s injury, I said, ‘Jeez. Come on, we got to get you to some medical place.’

McCall raised his eyebrows weakly and looked out at the city. I followed his gaze. ‘Oh,’ I muttered. The hospital had been next to the council building.

He shrugged. ‘I’ll manage,’ he said. ‘Come on, help me down from here. We’d better go check who else is still alive.’

I nodded and moved towards the steel ladder leading down to good ol’ solid ground. As I did so, I chanced a glance upwards at the bizarre glow above our heads. ‘One thing at a time,’ I muttered to myself.

As it turned out, quite a few other people had survived. They were nearly all military vermin and top brass, holed up in the subterranean command centre on the edge of the city. There were apparently some civvies still out there in the city proper, but some militia were taking care of them. I raised my eyebrows in surprise; seems CM’s aren’t completely useless, then.

The more pressing problem for us was: what the hell just happened? What was this energy curtain that had just appeared around our city? What had caused it, and why? And already, answers had been found, it seemed. The scientists and technicians the Guard keeps around (our pet lab rats, you know) had been poking at the curtain with nano-tech instruments and the like ever since the blast had died down, a whole thirty-seven minutes ago. They’d also achieved something. Once again I was astonished. An anomaly, a disaster and a miracle in the same day? Almost too incredible.

They have a proper explanation for it, but it’s incomprehensible to grunts like me. So here’s my version, even more dumbed-down than the one colonel Geller gave us. Energy field appears around city. We don’t know what it is. But guess what! There’s a magic door in one side. It has different ‘energy readings and temporal fluctuations’ than the rest of it. Stop me if I’m sounding too much like cheesy SF. But I am trying.

Anyway, that’s the tall and short of it. Already colonel Geller, top level in what was left of the chain of command, was planning something. I think they were going to send a light grav-tank through there, to take a peek and report back. They were, however, interrupted by the appearance of a radar contact over the other side of the city.

Yes, radar. When the city gets wiped out like this, you do tend to have to resort to more primitive methods of getting things done. We had to use an ancient and poorly tuned radar system. The thing might have been on the fritz, but it still reported an unidentified contact over the west side of the city. Right opposite our magic door where all attention was focused; no wonder no one had seen it.

Geller, a mad look in his tired eyes, was in no mood to mess around. ‘Hail it,’ he ordered. ‘Get it to land and stay put. If it doesn’t respond, shoot it down. Might be one of whatever did this to us.’

No one argued. No one wanted to. As it happened, the contact didn’t respond, just kept hovering slowly over the city. It was too far up to see by eye, so we couldn’t tell what it was. Didn’t matter after a while anyway; Geller had us drag out the AA gun from stores and blow it away. A tiny speck flared against the backdrop of white light for a moment, then was gone. We went back to looking at our portal. Sorry – the magic door.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to get the grav-tank kitted up and ready to rock ‘n’ roll. On a frontier world like New Johannesburg, military forces are always on the next best thing to full alert. A treaty of peace does not stop raids under the guise of pirates – and then there are the rare occasions when pirates actually do attack us.

They had two of our top pilots – or drivers, if you prefer – hop into that tank, and then they sent it up. The portal was pretty high, but you could see it in the force wall if you looked hard enough. It didn’t look that different, to tell you the truth. Still, our flyboys found it okay. As they passed through top brass played the radio chatter over the tanoy.

It didn’t last long – we heard the pilot saying how they were preparing to move forwards, that they had begun to pass through, and then nothing. Silence. We might have panicked before some techie informed Geller that the tank was OK. For some reason, passing through that gate had damaged their comms system. But everything else was OK, we were getting data back on the tank’s status, and there was some grainy video feed too.

The tank continued to move onwards. The camera, coming into focus after much determined work from the flyboys, showed something absolutely astonishing – there was a whole city through that portal, a damn huge great city! We couldn’t see much of it, and even if we could have our attention was quickly dragged away by a beeping on the tank’s status panel.

‘Something’s trying to hail them,’ reported a tech. Wow, he could read – I could have told that from the flashing ‘incoming hail’ banner emblazoned across the screen. ‘They won’t be able to respond,’ snapped Geller. ‘Try using the lights on the tank to flash them.’

I was a bit dubious as to how well that would work, several miles up, but I didn’t comment – Geller’s vein had begun to throb, a big nasty one on his forehead. Then: ‘Shit! Something’s firing on them!’ Geller was right – hits were being reported all over the tank from some projectile weaponry. Even on the video footage we could see shells whizzing by, before one blew the camera off it’s housing. And then the tank died, its power source crushed, and it presumably plummetted to the ground.

There was silence at our end. Then Geller’s trembling fist crushed the radio he was holding. The blood was rushing to his face now – he was seriously losing it. Hell, I don’t blame him. How often does this shit happen to someone? He turned to the nearest subordinate and handed out orders, straining the words between his teeth. ‘Prepare a missile barrage. Nuclear ordinance. I want that city through there wiped clean. No one shoots my boys.’

As the guy scuttled off to do his bidding, he span around, eyes roving over the assembled military goons, including little ol’ me. Just my luck, then, that he picked me out. ‘Captain,’ he snarled, ‘Take another man and check out the flyer we shot down. If it belongs to these bastards I want to know who they are.’

I didn’t argue. Just rapped McCall on the shoulder and left, him in tow.

We managed to acquire a light skimmer as we headed out towards the wreckage. Hell, it was about a mile out from the city, and I couldn’t be bothered to walk that. Not right now, and not over this planet’s less than verdant atmosphere. McCall sat beside me, leg swathed in bandages, whistling some tuneless tune.

It didn’t take long to pick out the crashed flyer. The planet’s atmosphere has enough oxygen to support a bit of fire, but not so much an explosion is catastrophic, either. We just followed the barely dispersing clouds of black smoke – there isn’t much wind here to break them up.

‘Looks bad to me,’ murmured McCall. ‘Got the bastards good, huh?’ He grinned, revealing a few sharp incisors.

‘Sure,’ I muttered.

‘And what’s up with you?’ he retorted.

‘Bad feeling, wolfman. That junk look familiar to you?’ As I spoke, I brought the skimmer to a gentle halt barely fifty metres from the wreckage.

‘Hell, I dunno,’ he snapped, but he looked more carefully when he caught my eye. He stared blankly for a minute or two before speaking. ‘Well… I guess it does look quite like a tank of some sort. Maybe one of ours? That what you think? Someone jumped one of our crews?’

I didn’t reply. I was too busy staring at a piece of charred and twisted but recognisable shard of metal from the hull of the crashed flyer. Then I gargled a little and raised a trembling finger to point at the metal.

It read The Johannesburg Midget.

It was our fucking tank.

McCall caught sight of it too. ‘What…?’ he murmured. Then: ‘Jesus, Mary! It’s ours!’

Shaken out of my horrified reverie, I replied ‘Yeah. S’ours. But, man, I’ve got a really shitty idea in my head now.’ I turned to look him in the eye before continuing. ‘We sent a tank through that portal. Minutes before, one appeared back over here. We shot it down – and then ours got shot down. Same shells. And the two tanks are the same thing. Right?’

He nodded, slowly.

‘So what happens,’ I said slowly, hating the words, ‘if we prepare to launch a missile barrage through there?’

He paused a moment, chewing over the words, and then his eyes widened. ‘Holy shit!’ he blasphemed. ‘We gotta get back and stop Geller!’

I shook my head; I always was a defeatist. ‘Too late,’ I said. ‘They’ll come through here before they launch them. Different times.’ Then, as if to prove me wrong, there was a thunderous clap of noise, and a bright pinprick of light climbed upwards from the centre of the city, heading towards the portal. McCall jumped up and cheered in joy.

‘You see!’ he yelled. ‘We launched and nothing has happened! Look, it’s just about to go through the-‘

And then something exploded over New Johannesburg, and the skies lit up like a star was being born.

Shaun Green, 1999