DT 2022: Utah's Mission

“Do what is right; no matter the cost.”
The Utah family mantra was as old as the family’s rise to the stars. A surname appropriated from a First Nations’ title for a tribe who once lived in the mountains of the old United States of America – the Ute. It was an adapted word from a local dialect adapted again and adopted into the English language; appropriated and conquered like its land and people – lost to time.
Jazmine Utah on some occasions wondered on her family history in this light. If she were able to trace her history back a hundred generations, would she find her ancestors among the natives who lived in the mountains? Or the colonizers who buried them with disease, technology, and time?
Maybe she had family from both sides of the conflict, or maybe her ancestry was an adapted fiction too.
It was a foolish mental exercise – a thousand years later and humanity settled beneath other suns. The universe barely remembered the Ute people. A thousand more years and no one would remember Jazmine, maybe just another name in a footnote of history if she was unlucky. There was her childish wish to become famous, and her adult fear of entering history for an X-reason.
The mind of adult and child went back and forth with each other in her imagination from moment-to-moment, year-to-year. Such minutia was pointless, but the pointless things made her personality between logic and quirks of emotion. Every piece of her, real and fake, adult and child, made her Jazmine Utah.
And Rear Admiral Jazmine Utah was someone who believed in doing the right thing – no matter the cost. But for who? For her? For what?
Her ancestors asked those questions too. And went on adventures born of their beliefs. Fought the corpo-statists of Jupiter in the Interplanetary War. Faced the hardships of settling the first interstellar colonies of Epsilon Eridani. Planting fisheries in an empty sea under an alien star. Traveled lightyears and time, putting out the fires of the Insurrection.
A long line of military service and forging hardy futures. Explorers and warriors. Righteous men and women – the Utah clan.
But being right didn’t always come with awards. Believing you were right doesn’t mean others will see it that way.
The Utah family committed its fair share of tragedies against the Jovian ice-hoppers. Broke coveted contracts with Misriah over political and social circus fiascos. Lost house-vessels to the unforgiving vacuum. Drowned in the shadows of Circumstance’s oceans.
Space was a hard place to live, challenging with its often-inhospitable obstacles and the cutthroat humans living there. Utah’s mother found her cost eventually, grounded by the Aerospace Force to an aquatic UNICOM posting as a boat captain on the warless water-world Circumstance. The Utah matriarch was a tough-as-nails woman; she never let the early career-ending accident put her down and accepted her punishment without complaint. She was tough in everything, not letting her own daughter call her “Mom.”
Jazmine was never sure what her fishery father saw in that woman. But Jazmine knew quickly she wanted to be up in the stars, to be like her mother, and nothing like her too. The good daughter shipped out to Earth and Luna before her fifteenth birthday and didn’t see Circumstance again for a couple decades.
She made the right choice. Jazmine repeated that to herself many a times serving with Naval Intelligence. From the Insurrection, to alien first contact at Harvest, to the Covenant War. From a lowly officer cadet to a low-minted Rear Admiral. Decades before she came home. Didn’t come back for her dad’s funeral at sea. Or when her mother asked her back to accept the family will.
Utah took care of the family from a healthy distance, at least the next star system over. Her mother passed without the good daughter coming home. Utah got one small flyby of Circumstance as the Covenant glassed its few and small, continental population centers. The genocidal aliens moved on quickly and so did she.
Category:Short stories