U-12

           Home. A place I’ve never been.

           The waves crash against the shore as I step out of the hatch of my C-32 Starfighter and onto its gray, carbon scored hull. What an odd thing to call the blackened marks, ‘carbon scoring’. Science debunked the theory, yet the name remains and even those of us who know better use it.

           My mind refocuses on my surroundings, the waves battering the sandy shore, driven by the same forcefulness that kicks the sand into little whirls lifting up into the air. Gray flakes float down from the sky, much the same color as my ride, each one a crystalline structure with six sides. Upon further inspection I can just barely see the white skeleton within it’s translucent form as it transforms in my hand to a silvery liquid. The smell wafts up to me, the scent of spices, of cumin and paprika. So odd to smell without seeing the yellows and reds of the powders. I listen and can hear the squelching of the melting flakes barely audible over the howling and roaring.

           Inhospitable. Volatile. Like you.

           I’ve heard it all my life but had never seen it. A flash of light overhead reminds me of an explosion in space, soundless. But unlike space battles, the sound does follow, even if delayed. You can’t have combustion without oxygen, so we had to add capsules full of air around our missiles. It’s beautiful and terrible all at once to watch the flash in the darkness puncture a hole in a ship, but the sound can’t carry. Sound is the vibrating of particles, and the vacuum of space has none to vibrate. But here, the air vibrates with tension as the next flash prepares to unleash from the shadows above, terrible dark things with hints of grassy alien hues. The sound is like the creak of metal that surrounds you when the pressure is too much, and a missile has punctured your own hull. I hope you’ve never experienced that, and hope you never will. Few have and survived. Another memory from my time in the Space Corps, as if I have memories from anything else. It became my life, as it did for many orphans.

           But this is home, and I see it for what it is.

           The mountains in the distance glow red, volcanoes leaking their molten fluids like pimples on a pubescent boy’s forehead. This planet, like that boy, is destined for destruction. But then again, aren’t we all? It’s human nature, and it seems to be the nature of the universe as well.

           I watch as the sky swirls, funneling itself down into the waves, a dip here, a dip there. Perhaps there’s a pattern, a purpose, but I can’t see one. I step off my ship, dropping to the sand I catch myself. My feet leave footprints as I wander up the beach, pondering the strange colors swirling above me. Things change in plain sight, greens go gray before flashing violet, crimson, colors I cannot even name. Shades between blue and yellow, none of which are green. I can’t explain it, and I dare not try. The particles are growing. Where they were but flakes, now they agglutinate, those six-sided slivers forming structures no longer two dimensional. I would call them orbs, but they’re not. I dare not estimate the sides to these polyhedra, nor try to describe them for fear of leaving you unawed. They are magnificent as they begin to dive to the ground, No bigger than my head, they gain in speed till their terminal velocity is reached and they slam into the sand and water sending geysers of solid and liquid gushing up.

           I try to pick one up and find it to be heavier than I’d have ever imagined. Then it starts to slowly melt, a thick gelatinous sludge that smells of capsaicin and copper, burning the nostrils. The hues in the silver metal are not the red of peppers, nor bronze or brass. They’re changing in front of me, chemically changing, their density growing exponentially as my fear does in response. To be marooned here would be a nightmare nearly as terrible as what caused this all in the first place.

           I jog to my craft, pull myself up and drop in behind my controls. The impacts grow closer. The engines roar, I feel lift off as it levitates, then I hit the thrust and I’m flying. I cruise, loving every moment as I hug the terrain and begin to explore from the air.

           The turbulence is jarring, the sights unforgettable. I see what were once green fields, yellow and pockmarked now, the scarred landscape of a once inhabitable planet. I assume the small craters are from the impact of the polyhedra I saw before, the center of each holds a small bed of metallic liquid where the missiles impacted. I wonder what matter each is made of, what chemical compound can be as volatile as the rest of this place? Although, perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps this unstable matter is what drives these changes. I’ll never know.

           What did we do?

           The stories tell of a time when this planet was normal, much like Earth-1. They tell of a time when humanity colonized this uninhabited sphere and made it a home. My family’s home. But war does strange things to people. Places too it would seem.

           The flashing lights are changing colors now, like everything else here, always changing. I fly by a large lake and watch as water droplets begin to raise up to meet droplets that are falling from the sky. It’s as if some magnetic charge sits in the middle, hovering, bringing them together to create a sheet of water that hangs above the landscape. It’s jarring to see. Unearthly. But I remind myself, this is no longer Earth-7, it’s U-12, short for uninhabitable, the twelfth iteration.

           The water surges now, pulling together into a sphere before bursting. The energy needed to turn that much water into steam and gas so instantaneously is baffling. This mist begins to rise and toil through the air as it begins to take on the colors of the bodies it journeys to join.

           Trees bend. Their leaves slapping, branches groaning, and yet nothing falls or breaks. They have a metallic hue to them, odd to see something that looks so solid bend like rubber having adapted to its surroundings. I watch as polyhedra fall to my right, splitting as the move, slowing as the split, refusing to stop their degradation in flake form and finding their way to a fine powder that begins to drift down. I watch on, as I skirt the calamity, watching it ever changing.

           The rebels hid here and the people asked to sue for peace. People couldn’t believe they dropped the bomb. Dirty bomb they call it. When the nuclear core is encased in radioactive material. The intent is to cause a lasting fallout, one that creates both destruction and devastation for both the moment and for a lifetime. No one ever explained what went wrong here, perhaps no one ever figured it out. But this world changed when humanity was wiped from it. Now the electric crackling threatens to char all living things and odd metals fall from the sky. Volcanoes burp forth the very guts of the planet. Nothing is safe. And I think this is goodbye.

           Hello home. Goodbye home.

           I pull up, my ship coursing up and through the colors as they change, gray, lime, gray, cherry, gray, turquoise. I make it through the atmosphere and look back at the graveyard that was my birthplace, a scar on our galaxy. Today marks the day I defect. Vengeance or annihilation. Just like my home. Just like my family.

Long live the revolution.