As the voice of Joey Tempest filled the spaceship,
Aram pondered that he hadn't had a conversation in his mother tongue in over two thousand years.
The last time he’d heard his native Dacian language he'd been on a narrow road leading from the Roman citadel Apulum. He'd chatted with his old uncle and with a pair of centurions on horses. They'd talked about emperors and tribes and the weather.
And then he was on a starship.
Aram sighed. From shepherd, to space pilot, he thought for the hundredth time.
“We're headed for Venus,“ announced Joey Tempest proudly.
The sound came from everywhere. The cockpit was just big enough for one person. He didn't know, and didn't really care, how the music player worked. It wasn’t some alien device; it was a human machine. A gift, of sorts. A team of German researchers had revived Mark's HTC One (an ancient device for them; a daily accessory for Mark until just recently; and an object as futuristic as the alien spaceship he was flying, for himself) and managed to extract the Brit's music collection out of it.
Aram had instantly fallen in love with glam metal.
The lively drums, the gruff guitar riffs, the strong bass accents, the soaring voices and the amazing guitar solos were completely out-worldly for the ancient twenty-four-year old. He had learned that the band he was listening to was Swedish; he had some knowledge of the Vikings, but for the life of him he couldn't figure out how those plundering bastards could've created something as magical as heavy metal.
But the lyrics were even more puzzling.
“Fuck's so interesting about Venus?“ he muttered to himself.
He checked his surroundings and called up the ship's holographic map. It popped up right in his lap. He zoomed and panned around the solar system and looked for the second planet from the Sun. Dacian runes mixed with Greek and Latin letters floated around it.
It was a hot white hell. He read an atmospheric pressure nearly a hundred times that of Earth's, and surface temperatures in the upper three hundreds. Why the Swedes would want to go to Venus was a mystery to him.
He shrugged.
“Monnet, this is Effo,“ he said.
“Go ahead,“ instantly replied a voice in a Slavic accent. Aram turned the music down.
“Yuri, have you guys ever been to Venus?“
Yuri Petrovich Petrov was a Russian major on the Eurasian space cruiser ESS Monnet. He was a big man with a large, round head adorned by blue eyes, a perpetual smile and a thick moustache, and he had instantly taken a liking to Aram. As soon as they'd met, Petrov's superiors noticed the click and, more or less officially, assigned the jovial major to be the Eurasian contact person for Aram.
The latter would've maybe preferred a certain female captain, but he wasn't about to say it.
“Why do you ask? Is anything wrong with Venus?“
“No, I was just wondering.“
There was a small pause as the Russian considered.
“We sent a couple of probes, right at the beginning of the Space Age,“ he answered after a few moments.
“Nothing there worth going to, right?“
“No, I don't think so. Not that we know. Again, why?“
Aram sucked his teeth. “Never mind. How are the repairs going?“
“Better, now that the Yanks stopped putting holes into everything and everyone we fix.“
The Dacian gave a short laugh.
“How's your recon mission?“ asked the Russian in turn.
“No sign of the Eight,“ said Aram, checking again.
“OK. We're waiting for you home in another hour, as planned.“
The casual mention of the word “home“ didn't go unnoticed by the Dacian, but he chose not to comment. An official agreement had never been reached, and the Eurasians were still trying everything to convince the crew of Starship Doi that they belonged on their side.
“See you later, Yuri. Effo, out,“ said Aram, and turned the music back up.
Another hour left to fly.
He'd welcomed the opportunity to fly, even when there was nothing to, well, blow up. His ship, Effo — Mark had unintentionally suggested the name, saying it was only one U short of a UFO — felt to him like a second body. Like Doi-the-ship must feel to Doina, Aram thought.
He'd had no idea that he had the makings of a space pilot. Hell, he hadn't even been aware of outer space. Even the word “pilot“ was just another of those concepts injected straight into his brain by the alien starship, when it decided that he needed to know English in order to communicate with Doina and Mark.
How long ago had that happened? He frowned and thought. A month? Two? Something like that.
The shiny orb of the Sun rose up over his head, a star like any other, if relatively bigger. Shadows crept over his controls, as he turned in a large arc, aiming back towards the solar system plane.
From shepherd to space pilot, he thought again. He couldn't even rightly remember what sheep looked like.
And then, after Doi's automated satellite, or whatever the hell it was, plucked him straight out of the third century and onto the alien starship, and he'd met Doina, the twelve-year-old girl from the twelfth century, and Mark, the former soldier of the twenty-first century, and after they'd been attacked by Americans, and after they'd fought with their best soldiers and been taken prisoners and flown to an American cruiser, and half-fought, half-found their way back out again, Aram found himself forced to fly a “crate,“ a small American space craft.
And that, — more than waking up in the future, more than learning English, more than finding out about aliens — that changed his life forever.
He discovered that he was a natural pilot, and he discovered that flying was what he'd been born to do.
Giving up that crate had felt really wrong.
But discovering Effo, parked right under the airlock of their own starship, felt incredibly good.
The three of them — Mark, Doina and himself — had ended up mingled in the Moon War, a space conflict between Americans and Eurasians over mines on the Moon. Both the Yanks and the so-called Queens had tried to win them on their side. The Yanks had used direct force; the Eurasians had been more devious. Aram felt sure that neither the unfortunate American cruiser commander Gaines, who had nearly killed Doina and nuked them all up (and whose bones Aram had endeavoured to methodically break for that reason), nor the scheming German colonel Tiessler whom they met later, was anybody on whose side Aram would've gladly fought in a war.
After all, the only thing they were all after was Doi.
The amazing starship, which customised itself for its three-person human crew, with its near-lightspeed engines and versatile matter converter, was what they wanted.
Of course, the starship alone would've been useless. Only Doina, the young girl who kept talking about God (Christianity was another thing that had Aram perplexed), she alone could tame the huge flying alien torus into doing whatever she wanted. Even the ship's name, Doi, had been imparted from the young girl's name — it had been what her mother used to call her, over a thousand years before. When Doina went into Room One, the starship's designated command-and-control centre, and connected with the ship, that was an amazing sight.
Not that he was easily amazed. He was a cool young man, who took everything in stride and made the best of everything. His people, the Dacians — the ancestors of Doina's Vlachians, and the forefathers of the Romanians, now part of the Eurasian alliance — had always believed that they were immortal. At some level, Aram was still pretty sure death was somehow inconsequential. Or, at least, something that mostly happened to other people.
Mark, on the other hand, as the chief strategist of their little group, was always trying to err on the side of caution.
Aram respected Mark. When he'd first met the small, wiry Englishman, he knew he was looking at a soldier, even though Mark's manners were reserved and his tongue gentle, like the scholar he'd said he was. That he was also a soldier, it turned out, had been a well-guarded secret. Mark had been a member of the British Special Forces. During a secret mission, he’d been badly tortured and then forced to watch his friend being decapitated, somewhere in what they called the Middle East. He had promised to look after his friend's family, but failed. He’d been medically discharged from the military and, in an attempt to save him from himself and from the vengeful jihadists, he was sent to the quiet backwaters of Romania as an English teacher, and then swiftly kidnapped by Doi before he'd even set foot in a Romanian school.
The little girl whom he'd failed to protect had been about the same age as Doina.
Aram knew what that meant for Mark. The Brit was extremely well trained, both physically and mentally, and he could think on his feet. He had a thorough, analytical mind and he knew how to work things out. Aram had lived his life mostly by jumping headlong into whatever came his way, but Mark was nothing like that.
Aram had seen Mark fight. They'd even fought each other, both for real and for practice. He'd seen how he planned and judged his moves in fractions of a second, and how he made the most complicated fighting techniques seem effortless.
Now Mark was a man he was really, really glad to have on his side.
The three of them made up the whole crew of Starship Doi. It was difficult at first, to be sure; even finding food had been a challenge. The alien starship was capable to create things, assuming it could be made to understand what to do. Of course, it was easier when Doina did it, as she usually merely had to think about the things she needed created. Her connection with the starship was intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Mark and Aram were reduced to tapping dark icons on the command panels, or speaking with the ADM, the ship's Automated Decision Maker, who, more often than not, seemed to have its own agenda.
Even the uniform he was wearing — matte black, with a silver, elegant “Doi“ on the chest — had been created out of the strange alien gel that the starship seemed to have in endless supply. And it fit much better than his old woollen pants.
In war, it's always important to have good clothes!
The Moon War. Aram had seen people killed in a million ways before. If it hadn’t been for the poor Romans who did their best to keep some order in the land, there would've been nothing but war in Dacia. He wondered what Naevius, the Roman centurion with whom he had chatted right before he'd been plucked by Doi, would've made of the idea that people wage war in the skies.
He'd seen people die before. But not the way they died in space.
He would never forget the first dying people he saw on the Moon's orbit.
Helpless puppets tumbling through space at great speed, flailing their arms and legs, doomed to a horrible fate, some killed by Doi's automated defences in what later seemed like mercy.
Aram shuddered.
It was a horrible war. And, right in the middle of it, they had been given an ultimatum: choose a side, or face both.
Neither the Americans nor the Eurasians could afford the alien starship on the other side. The crew of Doi had been asked to choose, or else.
They were spared the choice, however, by the sudden arrival of Five — an unbelievable being made of literally astronomically long strands of antimatter (Petrov had tried to explain to Aram what antimatter was, with moderate success); a single individual who could stretch itself in space over billions and billions of kilometres. A single individual of a race consisting of exactly eight. The Eight.
The Dacian Wars paled in comparison to the World Wars.
The World Wars paled in comparison to the Moon War.
And the Moon War paled in comparison to the Cold War between the Eight and the Builders.
The Builders were the aliens who had created Starship Doi. They were masters at manipulating matter. Their enemies, The Eight — that incredible race of only eight conscious, intelligent and powerful antimatter beings — ruled over a Union of many alien races. They could be undetectable even for the Builders technology, and they moved through space riding gravity waves, small molecular-sized antimatter bundles forming gigantic filaments.
They'd arrived and carelessly destroyed an Eurasian base, the Yǒngqì. They'd arrived and immediately demanded that Earth choose a side.
Speaking for the entire planet, the German Tiessler and the American negotiator Drake asked for some time to think about it.
Five agreed and vanished without another word. Nobody knew when it would return and what they'd tell it then. Aram had been tasked to fly Effo, the little starship that was like his second body, in recon missions around the solar system, looking for odd gamma radiation patterns that might herald the presence of an improbable, huge being made of antimatter on its way back to Earth, demanding an answer on which would depend the fate of his entire planet.
“It's the final countdown,“ yelled Joey Tempest.