Neptune. 2912
It was a tranquil morning as the water worked its way up the sandy coast of the continent. All was still except for the growing light in the East. The gentle suns worked their red rays up the sky like the rungs of a ladder. Fires sprung up like blossoms around the beaches, around which the soldiers huddled and talked of things in secret as smoke from their cigars and cigarettes rose into the morning air. It was during this expectant lull of work when the smell of breakfast came wafting out of the dining hall and the brilliant fire sparked with damp wood.
"What do you think George?" asked the young soldier. "What do you make of it?"
George sat in pensive thought, digging the rubber toe of his boot into the ground, spitting, then rubbing his hands against each other like sandpaper.
"Seems alright to me...." he said. "Nothing too bad about it yet. Land looks good, far as I could see."
George was older, perhaps about forty, with a brown tan and worn armour clad on his wide chest and shoulders. His lips were greyed and browned with tobacco of a thousand working days, and his hands were like the stumps of hickory; worn and tired. Around his neck, he wore a carved wooden necklace of beads he had received as a gift from a dream-like lover in a galaxy far away, back when he was a younger man, the face and likeness of which he had long forgotten; yet she still survived, a faceless, nameless figment in the fondness of his memory. She was dark-haired and tall, a native alien through and through, mysterious as the purple mountains of the valley and the trickling crystal creeks of her lands. In her eyes, he vividly remembered, there was a passion of a thousand generations, a meaning, something absent in his wayward, bluish Anglo eyes that implored into her dark pupils.
"Do you think this island has natives?"
George again spat, thinking before he spoke. "No, I don't think it does. No natives here. But you can never be too sure."
You can never be too sure.
He remembered with clarity the skulls on spikes and the burning carcasses lining the hut walls, wrought of one thousand invasions and hundreds of bloody conflicts. He remember the spears of the natives lurching out of the undergrowth like one thousand ligaments extending from a singular, dark body, reaching forward to lance his gut like in a brillant silver flash of lightning.
You can never be sure of anything, now.
"George, do you think that....."
George was no longer listening to the youth. He was somewhere else, buried in a sudden influx of memory, hallucinations of times come and gone. He remembered the long-haired girl who spoke the alien tongue on Pluto. He remembered the look in his comrade's eyes as he spoke his last, dying words, blood forming on his reddened lips.
"George, got a rock to spare?"
George was laying down on his green canvas cot, his rifle propped up against the wooden pegs and his helmet placed over his forehead.
"Hear me George? Got a rock to spare?"
"What's the use?" he replied, at last. "What are you going to do with it?"
The other man sat down on his cot and took out his knife, whittling away at a shred of wood. "There's a bet going on, you see," said the other, distracted. "They are wondering how many times they're going to serve us freeze-dried potatoes. I've got three weeks. What do you think?"
George said, irritated, "I don't know. Don't care."
"Don't care!" said the man, practically yelling. Then he stood up, tossing his knife into the splintered wood ground. His cheeks flushed with a blush of red, and with his left hand he snapped the sharp wood he had been crafting. "What do you mean you don't care George? A man can't survive off of potatoes for two years! Hell! You've got to give a damn, George! I sure as hell do! I'm not going to die out in here in the middle of nowhere!"
