Well, here is a story I’ve been wanting to write for some time, it’s set in the far future and concerns a fictional heroine “Lyra Starfire” - she’s been mentioned in some older stories of mine - and this time we finally get to meet her. The other thing is that I’m in it (I do this quite a bit) but this time mostly not from my point of view, for a change.
Lyra Starfire and the Legion of Space
Episode 20: Fog of War
We watched as this tall, attractive young blonde-haired woman wearing a flight suit entered the room and sat before us. Various badges and decorations were pinned slightly haphazardly on her suit, and I knew that she’d not bothered to attach even half that her valour and skill demanded. But the most striking thing, for me at least, were the glasses she wore: thick, strong, shiny lenses, refracting her vision to clarity and shrinking her eyes by about 20%, an effect which still fascinated me - not that there wasn’t anything else to attract the attention of a male - they were the latest version of a style now hundreds of years old, “aviator” she’d called them. She caught my gaze and sent me a little, slightly nervous smile. It still felt strange to me, just a grunt really, having spent some serious time with the most famous astrofighter pilot this side of the galaxy. She sat down and started to speak.
‘You all should know me by now, but anyway, for those that don’t know, my name is Lyra Starfire, captain of the Eighth Astrofighter wing, currently attached to the 14th fleet. I shall tell you what happened to me as I saw it.’ She gave a grim smile, then continued ‘I was leading the Alpha section back to base when we intercepted a Xaran transmission - something about bringing supplies. We traced it to its source, but by that time I had to order the rest of the section to turn back for lack of fuel - I had just enough to go and check it out, run a scan and then scamper home. Well, there was definitely something going on there, I can tell you all about it later, not least because they had one of those high powered defense installations there, I nearly got away, but they shot everything at me and hit my main engine, and I was going down…’
Lyra regained consciousness slowly, hearing at first the sound of a smashed up astrofighter groaning, then, oddly, a sound like a monkey calling. Her eyes opened to a dizzying blur, her brain struggling to comprehend where she was and what had happened, and what exactly was a monkey doing in her astrofighter? Then, as the blur stubbornly refused to clear, she remembered she wore glasses to see. Or, she should. A moment later, she realised she wasn’t wearing them. Looking around using just her uncorrected vision was useful, but only up to around 2 feet away for anything not big, after that things rapidly got too blurry to be sure about. After few moments of looking and feeling around the cockpit, she moaned ‘awww, shit!’ As she realised her astrofighter was fit for the scrap heap: nothing worked, she didn’t need clear vision to know that. She couldn’t find her glasses: they’d been knocked off, and were now crushed under the control panel to her left. That didn’t really worry her so much, because she had a spare pair in the locker at the back. She could smell the burned metal conduits, plasma leaking, etc, even if her blunt vision could not easily confirm details: the back was far worse off than the front. She felt around where the locker was, and found that a bulkhead had bent and collapsed onto it, rendering the door impossible to open. But the contents could be intact, she thought to herself, trying not to consider the alternative. After pushing and pulling at bent and twisted metal without much success for a few minutes, she drew her blaster. She looked at it closely to confirm the charge: it was low, but not useless, then tried it.
It did cut into the bulkhead, but also into an small energy conduit, causing a small fire to break out: after some alarm she extinguished it, and dropped the now-empty emergency fire fighting bottle. Unhappily she sighed, and muttered to herself ‘Oh, heck, I can’t try that again. I need to find help.’ She went back to the main control panel: most of it was fried, but the short range comms still worked. She fiddled with it for a moment… hearing Xaran voices, then human, but unable to tell what was being said apart from ‘under attack…. send… Muffin…’ She mused on the meaning of that, then she shrugged. She’d done survival behind enemy lines, and had been without glasses for a while in training before too, but not more than half an hour. Now she had both together, trying to survive on a hostile world with about 1.5% of her normal vision. 1.5% was better than nothing, she thought to herself optimistically, until she tried looking for something useful like food supplies or another charge unit for her blaster. They were around, but the ride down had shaken them around: she found a few emergency rations but no spare charge unit. Time was ticking away, no doubt those pesky Xarans would send some soldiers to check out the crash site and capture her, or at least make her life more miserable than it was anyway right at that point.
So, she went to the door, shoved it open and looked out. It was indeed a jungle out there, and Lyra had crashed spectacularly into it, ripping a long gouge into it, breaking trees and cutting a furrow in the ground. She looked around, her poor vision giving her little detail beyond the bare facts of trees around her. Her surroundings seemed pretty much the same whichever way she looked, a meaningless and detail-less blur of brownish-greenness. She heard the monkey calling mockingly above her, and looked, but saw nothing - it didn’t need much camouflage to hide himself from her. She shivered, and walked forward, away from the astrofighter, thinking it better to put as much distance as she could from it, knowing trouble would be drawn to the wreckage.
Lyra did her best to deal mentally with her feeble, uncorrected vision: it was okay relying on sound, but all she could hear was bird calls, animal calls and the like, with no idea what was making them, whether they were dangerous or not. She tried to console herself with the thought that, even with perfect vision it would all look pretty much the same anyway. But her main problem was that, if there was some landmark or feature worth either checking out or avoiding, she would have little or no idea about it from what she could see between trees. The other thing was the tripping up, feeling her way, thinking it was okay, wondering what she was walking over. Did that branch move? Or was it really just a branch? She started chewing on a ration pack in an attempt to distract her from her worries. Perhaps she should go back and make another attempt to retrieve her spare glasses? Naw, she thought, they weren’t easy to get at, and surely the Xarans would be there by now. She thought it safe to assume they weren’t as blind as her. She tramped on throughout the rather dim and fuzzy blur for some hours, tripping occasionally, trying to at least go in something like a straight line, to where she had no idea, increasingly nervous thanks to her poor vision and the knowledge that every step took her away from the correction she desperately needed. Unfortunately at one point, her poor vision failed her, she tripped on something she didn’t see, banged her head, her vision swam and then she blacked out.
Perhaps it was some after effect of the crash, or nervous exhaustion, or something else, but Lyra woke up hours later to pitch darkness. Scared rigid: for a moment she thought she’d gone blind completely, before realising that it was cooler, and must have been night. Her feeble vision was completely defeated by the darkness. She sat shivering against a tree, her eyes shut, jumping at every sound. She didn’t like this one bit, but tried her best to think of sunshine and green grass, all seen clearly through glasses. What was that tapping sound? No use looking, really. Her eyes saw nothing, then, she happened to look up and move forward, and saw… a fuzzy bright patch. It was distant, she thought, well past the trees. Was there someone there? Friend or foe? She scraped a line pointing at it in the leaf litter, and tried to sleep. It would keep till the morning: no chance of getting there now.
The next morning came and Lyra awoke to light groping uselessly for her glasses, as if she were back in her cabin on some relatively cosy star ship or at home back on Earth. Then it dawned on her where she was and why she had no glasses to relieve the horribly blurred view of the world she had. She sighed, and then remembered the line scraped in the ground: she’d done that, it wasn’t easy to see for her, but it pointed at where the light was. Unfortunately all she could see that way was a meaningless, useless blur between and beyond the trees, themselves shapeless lumps of green-brown blur. Despite that, she resolved to go and look anyway, for what it was worth. She walked forward, as best she could directly towards the source of the light she’d seen, and quite quickly the nondescript and detail-free forest green gave way to a barren grey-brown, reaching up before her. She crouched behind one last decent-sized tree and looked. Yes, there was probably something there, she thought, some sort of fortress, she imagined.
She heard noises, then shouts from nearby. Some figures, people she thought, were moving around, doing something but what exactly she had no idea, also who exactly no idea. Nervously she drew her blaster and read the charge level: 21%, not enough to fight a battle, but good for a few shots. She levelled the gun at the nearest figure, hesitated, and then really thought she heard Xaran speech, harsh and grating. She panicked, easily done when you can’t see too well and don’t know what’s happening, and fired. The figure fell, and then moments later answering shots spattered around her. Lyra, with her poor vision and low ammunition, did not dare stand and fight. She scampered back into the jungle, trying not to run into a tree. Some of the figures followed her: she couldn’t see enough to tell how many. Soon they were combing that area of jungle for her. She did her best to evade capture, shooting another of them, but sooner or later they had to find her: they could see far better than her. She was pushed along out of the jungle with a Xaran blaster rifle in her back, towards the grey blur of a fortress.
Lyra endured a quite physical interrogation for some long hours, and then was pushed into a cell. She looked around and saw three other fuzzy lumps. She could tell they were humans, but little else. It was disconcertingly difficult to gauge moods or actions with her level of myopia when uncorrected, in some ways more worrysome than wandering round the green-brown blur of the jungle. She asked ‘well, who are you, how long have you been here?’ One of them gave his name readily enough, explaining they’d been captured recently. Lyra wondered what he looked like: he sounded pleasant and reasonable, but she didn’t feel like shoving her face into his to find out more. The other two were more reticent, another male voice and a woman who spoke curtly, giving her name with an acid, resentful edge to her voice. Lyra didn’t understand what was happening, so assumed that the stress of the capture and interrogation had caused her ill temper. She wasn’t so pleased with that herself, feeling a bump on her forehead. They’d realised quite soon she couldn’t see very well: unfortunately, it was that obvious, really. She sighed to herself as the first soldier explained a little of where she was, and why they were there.
It seemed this place was just an ordinary observation base, the Xarans hadn’t set it up ready to run properly just yet. The small group of marines sent to investigate and perhaps destroy it had been captured, some of their number killed. Lyra heard a note of sadness in his voice when he said ‘our leader - the captain - was killed yesterday, I don’t really know how. Someone came out of the jungle and shot him, then ran away.’ At this, the woman muttered and spluttered something angrily, but then a guard walked by and her muttering ceased. Lyra couldn’t see the volcanic look on her face.
One by one the rest of them were taken out, and then some hours later returned. When the woman was taken, Lyra turned to the one called Puffin - the one who’d been most talkative. She hissed ‘have you thought about escaping?’ He shuffled up to her, and said in a low tone ‘yes… sort of. None of us can fly a shuttle, though, so unless we kidnap a pilot, then we are stuck here for now.’ ‘I’m a pilot.’ For a moment, there was a silence. She could not read his expression, nor meet his eyes. ‘But you can’t see very well can you?’ She gave a tiny sigh, and said ‘is it that obvious?’ ‘Yes it is, Lyra.’ ’How do you know my name?’
After a pause, he answered ‘You aren’t exactly unknown, your face is often in the news reports. Let’s just say I’m in your fan club, of which there are many members. But I never saw you without glasses. Hmmm, I’m thinking you have a spare pair of glasses somewhere, but you can’t get to them. That or you’re hoping the Xarans will make you a pair, otherwise pilot or no, you won’t be flying anything.’ She snorted, and then replied ‘Yeah, right,’ and proceeded to give an account of where her spare pair were the last time she saw them. After that, Puffin remarked ‘I see that you’re the only one of us with our arms cuffed behind us.’ ‘Hmm, probably because they think being as I’m so blind, I can’t do much. They’re probably right.’ ‘Even so, we can use that advantage.’ ‘You call that an advantage?’ ‘Erm… maybe I was exaggerating. But there’s got to be something we can do. Perhaps you can get the keys off the guard or something.’ ‘I’ll have to listen for them or something. Seeing things isn’t my strong point right now, you know.’ At that, the guards came back with the woman. Puffin tried to engage her in conversation, but she wasn’t interested.
Lyra and Puffin spent some time sitting near each other, as opposed to the other two who seemed disinterested. The inevitable happened: they were both taken for interrogation, and Puffin was told to tell more about their mission or “the blind girl gets shot”. Oh, how Lyra loathed Xarans anyway, but especially so after this. She could smell the Xaran interrogator, and the one nearby - was he holding a blaster? Anyway, Lyra pretended to be so scared by her ordeal that she had cracked. Really, it wasn’t so far from the truth. She murmured ‘come closer, and I’ll tell…’ she shivered a little, and the interrogator asked, in his harshly accented standard anglic ‘what? What’s that you’re saying?’ A bit louder, Lyra said ‘Come… closer. I’ll tell you everything. Don’t want to let him know what I tell you.’ The damn fool had spent some time learning his job, but not so much time with humans as he ought. Lyra kicked him hard where it hurt - and for Xaran males, it was the same place and just as unpleasant as for a human male - he fell. She saw and heard something happening a few feet away, obviously Puffin and the interrogator’s assistant struggling. One of the fuzzy lumps fell down, something skittered away along the floor. Puffin cried out ‘quick, grab the blaster!’ Lyra couldn’t see it, but started to feel for it. Puffin realised belatedly that she would never find it in time by simply looking, seeing as the chief interrogator was getting to his feet. He called out, whilst struggling with the assistant ‘to your left…. further… a bit nearer me…’ Being still handcuffed, he wasn’t doing so well. It was now or never.
A heartbeat later, Lyra’s fingers touched a hard thing. She saw a ghost of something, easily confused with her fingers. Another heartbeat, she’d grabbed it. It was the blaster. No time to check power levels or think about it. She pointed it at the chief interrogator, and pressed the smooth trigger with her fingers. A beam of energy zipped from the business end of it, blurred into an indistinct red cloud by her vision. The chief interrogator fell dead, with a puff of smoke wafting out of the burn in his chest. She turned to the struggling pair on the floor. There were two heads, and she couldn’t tell which was which. Their uniforms were an indisguishable grey-green blur. She addressed the two vaguely pinkish blurs, asking ‘so, which of you knows my real name?’ The left-hand blur spoke first ‘Lyra Starfire.’ She turned the blaster a few degrees to the right, unable to see the astonished look on the Xaran’s slimy, ugly face. A moment later, another bright red beam from the blaster burned right through it, his head and through the back of his head.
A few minutes later, Puffin had got the keys to the handcuffs, opened his, and found their weapons that had been captured with them, some standard issue blaster rifles, and Lyra’s blaster, her original one, not the one she’d just used. He took her borrowed one from her, and placed into her hands her own, saying ‘that one’s used up now, you did fire on maximum you know?’ Lyra gratefully took it from him, not really wishing to keep something touched by a Xaran for too long. He advised her not to try shooting again unless really necessary, saying ‘any closer than last time, I’d be past needing haircuts for a while.’ Then it was a relatively simple matter to get the other two out of the prison cell, kill a couple of guards and get going to the shuttle hangar.
Lyra needed Puffin to guide her to the hangar: this base had signs up, some of which she could have read with glasses, like this, she saw blurs that told her nothing. Before long they burst into an empty space. Lyra saw a couple of large grey-white blurry things: shuttles. There’s also another blur, and something about its colour is familiar. Puffin told her ‘there - it’s your astrofighter. Comon, you two hold them off.’ The other two took up defensive positions around one of the shuttles, hoping the Xarans would not shoot that much at it when they came. And come they did, and a fierce firefight blew up, for Lyra not much more than noise and blurred, indistinct bolts of red energy. She turned her attention to the particular blur in front of her. She patted it affectionately, and then went inside, followed by her guide, Puffin. There she discovered that it had been partly dismantled, although she wasn’t sure how much had been taken. But she had other concerns. She checked around the locker where she had left her spare glasses. Silently she hoped they were still there, undamaged. And that they could be got out, as quickly as possible.
Puffin politely touched her shoulder, and told her to ‘look out’. Lyra chuckled at the idea of that ‘at the moment, I can do all the looking I want, but not that much seeing.’ She let him inspect the twisted, ruined area around the locker. She saw him fiddle with the blaster rifle - a far more powerful yet flexible weapon than her hand blaster, meant for personal defense - then a thin, bright beam of red erupted from its muzzle - Lyra could see it was probably the finest setting available, as much like a precision instrument as it could be, without being useless. She smelt burning metal and plastic, hoping that her glasses would survive. She heard the firefight zapping away outside, saw reflections of the light produced by violent blasts of energy. ‘why’s it taking so long?’ ‘Be patient, please. It won’t be long.’ ‘Ahh, but it’s alright for you, you don’t to rely on glasses to see. I’ve had to put up with seeing poorly for sooo long.’ ‘Nearly there…’
Lyra saw the thin beam go out, and the rifle lowered. He got closer, and she could only guess that he was pulling whatever section he’d cut away. The blur that was Puffin moved, and turned toward her. Was it holding something? Something gold-coloured? She walked closer to see, as best she could. ‘Hold on, don’t get excited, let’s just check them.’ Lyra looked extremely unimpressed. She saw something taken out of the gold thing… ‘Well?’ ‘Yeah, they’re here, and intact. Hold still.’ Unexpectedly, he pushed back her hair and slipped the glasses onto Lyra’s face. Her eyes went from large to small, surrounded by refractions, from struggling to see to seeing perfectly well, her expression from unimpressed to delight and relief. And Puffin seemed to enjoy the transformation himself too: Lyra was a beauty, and strong glasses only added to that.
Determined, she said ‘now let’s get going,’ drawing her blaster. Puffin stopped her at the door, saying ‘stay at the back. You’re the only pilot we have. And there’s no more spare glasses around, yes?’ She glanced at him, admitting he was right, although she didn’t usually relish hiding from a fight. He led her back to the shuttle the other two had been defending. Now that Lyra could see, she saw that one of them - the man - was now dead, with a tell-tale smoking hole in his back. Unlucky, she thought. She caught the woman’s shifty, angry look, and told her to get aboard, which she gladly did. Moments later, they were all aboard, Puffin had used the weapons onboard to shoot up the Xarans so badly they were in no state to do anything, let alone stop them leaving, then destroyed the pitiful remains of Lyra’s ruined astrofighter, including her original glasses. Lyra had no time to worry about that: she had to get them home, although the shuttle was no astrofighter, she was plenty good enough to lose the pursuit and get back to the fleet without incident.
At that, the assembled top brass of which the military tribunal nodded, more or less in unison, and their chief, an older admiral, told her to stand down, and called for me, Puffin, to give evidence. I went up, and stood quite close to where Lyra was sitting. I told them all about how we had arrived, our transport shot to bits worse than Lyra’s, some of us killed before we landed or on impact. Despite this, we were marines, we still had our mission and would try to complete it. The Captain took us to the base, but we were spotted by a patrol, and they overwhelmed us, most of us being shot down before we surrendered. As I said this, I saw Lyra watching the female soldier she’d rescued, she still looked angry and rather shifty. What was her problem? I carried on talking, she carried on listening.
‘They took us back to the base for interrogation, but before we got there, Private Alice Johnson here shot the Captain, I don’t know why, perhaps you should ask her.’ ‘that’s for the court…’ The proceedings were interrupted by Private Johnson, who could not control herself: she shouted ‘that’s a whole load of bullshit, you, Lyra Starfire killed John, erm, the Captain, and Mike!’ Puffin shook his head, and said ‘No, Lyra appeared after you shot the Captain. Then she shot one of the Xarans. She got us out of there, you remember?’ There ensued quite a bit of an uproar, before the Admiral in charge of proceedings managed to restore some sort of order.
He asked me pointedly ‘So tell me what happened to Private Thomson.’ ‘Sir, I did not see how Private Thomson died. I can only assume he was killed by Xaran fire. We had to get out quickly. I didn’t have time to look hard.’ ‘Hmmm…. understood.’ After a moment talking to his immediate neighbour, he then asked ‘The hand blaster belonging to Captain Starfire has been examined. Here are the results.’ He read a small tablet, which contained the report, and then announced to the court ‘It seems that the charge unit was faulty, and has been empty for some time. Captain Starfire, how do you account for this? Did you actually shoot anything on that outpost?’ Lyra looked a little bemused, but she had no chance to answer. Private Johnson stood up again, and cried ‘It’s all lies! She’s a murderer! You switched it!’
She drew a blaster, carefully concealed in her uniform, and shot it at Lyra. I jumped forward, pushing her out of the way, getting a little singed myself in the process. Lyra shrieked in alarm, pushed her glasses straight, then thanked me and got to her feet. Her assailant, Private Johnson, was dragged kicking and screaming from the courtroom. Once things had calmed down, Lyra was once again asked about how she had shot anything. For a moment, she was silent. Then, she said ‘perhaps I was mistaken. I was under a lot of stress, I couldn’t see well, and I had no idea what was happening. Perhaps I didn’t shoot anything.’ The Admiral held her gaze, not very convinced by that explanation. After a short conversation with his fellow tribunal members, he announced ‘There will be a recess while we deliberate, then we shall attempt to give a verdict in an hour’s time.’
An hour and a half passed by before we were called in. Lyra was called to hear the verdict.
‘Lyra, the tribunal finds itself surprised by your lack of foresight, what with failing to wear your flight helmet - I understand this is common failing of yours, and not checking your blaster. Those are elementary mistakes, and an officer of your rank should know better. We must also say that if the blaster charge unit wasn’t faulty, then there would probably be enough evidence to implicate you in at least one suspicious death.’ I saw her facial expression change to something like shock at that. He continued ‘however, it does not need to be pointed out that we are at war with the Xarans, and thus we really need all the astrofighters we can get. Your previous exemplary record shows us that you are capable. Perhaps from now on, you need to be a little more careful with where you keep your spare glasses?’ Lyra looks abashed at that.
Suddenly, there was a siren heard in the distance. Moments later, one of the junior court staff came in and announced ‘Excuse me, sirs, but there’s a big Xaran attack coming our way. All combat personnel are needed.’ The admiral banged his gavel, and called out ‘court dismissed!’ Lyra was ushered out of the court building, with me close behind. Outside, she was taken to a waiting hovercar, which she quickly got into. Then she looked out, saw me, and waved me aboard, so I got in and sat next to her. There was a little silence as we whizzed along to the nearest astrofighter base, then Lyra turned to me, a curious look on her face ‘Puffin, tell me something, did you switch that charge unit?’ I nodded solemnly. ‘You crazy fool!’ She kissed me, and then said ‘I think I’m in your fan club now.’