Legend

by Webb, Nick

  Did they keep lying? he asked his companion.

  DANNY, NEITHER OF THEM EVER STOPPED LYING.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Savannah Sector

  Nova Nairobi, High Orbit

  ISS Independence

  Bridge

  Zivic was still in his flight suit when he ambled onto the bridge. “Admiral? What’s up? Was just about to get back to the Volz. Got a hot date tonight.”

  “Ethan. I’ve got a job for you.” She waved him over to the central command station. Her own XO was there, Commander Urda. He stood and reached out to offer a hand.

  “Commander Zivic? Commander Urda. A pleasure. I’ve heard so many . . . unbelievable things about you.”

  Zivic held up a hand. “I assure you, it’s all very, very true. Unfortunately. Sorry to disappoint.” He sat down in one of the chairs. Then continued, “Except for that story where I performed the Heimlich on the pope on a golf course, and out popped a piece of hot dog that scored a hole in one. That one? Wildly exaggerated.”

  “Oh, no, I meant I heard . . . good things about . . . oh, you’re joking.”

  Zivic tapped his brow. “This one’s a thinker.”

  Proctor sighed. “Gentlemen. We need a plan. Ethan, you’re here because you’re the best at out-of-the-box thinking. Urda, you’re here because I requested you by name to be my XO officer. Your reputation as a tactical officer at the battle of Penumbra is already a legend at every fighter pilot’s pub on every starship in IDF.”

  “Any popes involved?” asked Zivic.

  “None were available at the time,” replied Urda, deadpan.

  Zivic pointed a thumb and turned to Proctor. “I like him. Let’s make a plan.”

  “Here’s the problem. An enemy fleet is bearing down on Paradiso. A fleet that we have no data about. No idea how many ships, what kind, what their capabilities are, and more importantly, who is piloting them, what their motivations are, psyches, mental states, culture, weaknesses, strengths—nothing. And we need to repel them.” She took a breath to let the gravity sink in. “Options.”

  “Why Paradiso?” said Zivic.

  “No idea. We know they struck the colony of Zion’s Haven a week ago, and a direct line from there to Paradiso doesn’t exactly point towards Earth, but it’s in the general direction. My guess is that their goal is Earth, but they don’t quite know where it is.”

  “Really?” Zivic looked incredulous. “That seems hard to believe.”

  “Not really so strange,” said Proctor. “Space is an unthinkably large place. And you can’t exactly point your sensors at a distant star hundreds or thousands of lightyears away and figure out if it’s Earth’s sun. Tim says that they know about Earth because, well, because he essentially made them and endowed them with the knowledge of what they were supposedly meant to protect. But if they don’t know the exact location, it’s no surprise that they’re doing some . . . exploratory invasions, if you will, to gather intel about Earth’s location. Once they hit Paradiso though, I imagine Earth is not far behind. Assuming they have the ability to scour databases and review comms and sensor logs of planets and ships they defeat.”

  Zivic swiveled back and forth in his chair. “Right. So, I guess one way would be scorched Earth. Have Paradiso destroy all their computers and anything else that would point the way to Earth.” He glanced up at their stares. “But that’s stupid, I know.”

  “Worse comes to worst? If Paradiso is going to be destroyed anyway? It’s not completely out of the question. So again, options,” Proctor repeated.

  Silence from both men was her only reply, for over ten seconds.

  “Nothing? Urda? Ethan?”

  He scratched at his stubble. “Well to be perfectly honest, ma’am, it’s a pickle. How do you fight when you don’t even know who you’re fighting?”

  “I agree,” said Urda, rather unnecessarily.

  “Wonderful. You’ve just restated the problem back to me.” She let out an exasperated sigh.

  “I mean, short of just facing them head on with everything we’ve got? What else is there? Think about it: no matter what we discover about them, if it turns out they’re implacably hostile and mean to do us in, and if they’re truly powerful like Granger told you they are, then eventually, what other option is there? If there’s going to be a showdown, let’s do that away from Earth. They’re attacking Paradiso? Damn. That sucks. But it’s not Earth. Let’s make that the line in the sand. There, and no further. Throw everything we’ve got at them there. And I mean everything.”

  Proctor nodded slowly. “Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking the same thing. Oppenheimer is on his way with the bulk of the fleet. I just have this nagging feeling that we’re walking into a slaughterhouse, and that there’s got to be something we can do besides this. Even if we eventually have to face them, there’s got to be some way to test them first.”

  Urda mumbled something.

  “Excuse me, Commander?” said Proctor.

  “Play dead.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Urda pulled up something on the command console and started searching through it, but kept talking. “Play dead. Make them think we’re far weaker than they thought. Make them lower their guard.”

  Proctor thought for a moment, but then shook her head. “No. Their culture could very well be like the Dolmasi. If you show weakness to the Dolmasi, you’re done for. They attack. They see weakness as an opportunity. Who’s to say the Findiri won’t see us playing dead as an invitation to just sweep across every one of our systems and worlds?”

  Zivic shrugged, “I mean, they may very well do that anyway . . .”

  “Still,” said Proctor, “I want something more—something that takes the initiative more than lying down and letting them wallop a few of our starships.”

  Urda kept searching through some files. “What if they’re not our starships?”

  Zivic shook his head. “What, you want to fool the Dolmasi into taking the brunt for us? The Skiohra?”

  “No, I mean what if we had a few chunks of rock that we strap some railguns to. Some of our older retired starships are basically just that anyway. Send them in firing, get all up in their business, make them reveal what kind of weaponry and tactics they have, maybe get in some parlays back and forth, and in the meantime we learn lots and lose little.”

  “And?” Proctor’s tone dropped. “Is that little to lose? What if the whole op goes south? Paradiso is vulnerable.”

  Silence. The two others considered the prospect solemnly.

  Zivic shrugged. “Ma’am, with respect, Earth is vulnerable. Bolivar is vulnerable. San Martin. Mao Prime. Paradiso has a population of, what, Fifty million tops? Earth? Twenty billion. Mao Prime? Thirty billion. I don’t mean to sound ghoulish, but, given that what we learn could save hundreds of billions of lives, maybe fifty million might be an . . . acceptable sacrifice?”

  More silence.

  “Ethan,” Proctor took a deep breath. “There is no such thing as an acceptable sacrifice. That’s why it’s called a sacrifice.”

  “Right,” said Zivic. “I don’t mean . . .” He struggled for words.

  She touched his shoulder, briefly. “We know what you meant. And you’re right. But I think it’s important that— I think we should strive to make sure war doesn’t turn us into unfeeling, calculating monsters. Even if the war is just. Even though we’re in the right. We’re just defending ourselves. We can’t turn into that which we fight. Too many have sacrificed their all for that to happen. Tens of thousands at the battle of Penumbra alone.”

  More somber silence. In her mind’s eye the scoreboard hovered over them all. Were both sides of it about to get much bigger? She was beginning to think that this was simply an unwinnable scenario. How do you fight, much less prevail, against an enemy you know nothing about?

  “All those damaged ships from Penumbra. The ones that actually made it out. Where are they? What happened to them?” asked Zivic.

&
nbsp; Proctor paced. “Most went to Wellington Shipyards and were either repaired right away or are slated to begin repairs soon. Others were too far gone and are mothballed.”

  “But they were operational enough to make it out of the battle of Penumbra? I mean, their conventional engines and q-jump drives were still intact, clearly.”

  “Yes.” She began to nod. “I see where you’re going.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten, at least.”

  “In other words, enough to pretend it’s a serious attempt at a defense. So we network them together, make them all remotely operational, and have a skeleton crew pilot them all from a single starship that can get away fast when things turn south.”

  Proctor’s grip on the command console tightened. She knew it was the right idea. And she knew who needed to command the fleet. There was really no other option. It had to be her.

  “Okay. We’re going in. The Independence. There’s no starship better equipped to handle the logistics involved with remotely controlling an entire fleet. Except, Mr. Zivic, you’re wrong if you think a remote crew can operate a starship. Most systems are automated, sure. But reloading railguns? Engaging manual overides when automated systems are damaged during a fight? There’s only so much a remote crew can do. Each ship needs a skeleton crew to be there in person.”

  “The acceptable sacrifice,” said Urda. He’d finally pulled up the file he was looking for. Ships. Their images superimposed with their names. The ISS Hammer. The Kobe. Copenhagen. Many others, all mothballed, but with q-drives intact.

  She paused for several moments. “Exactly.”

  The three of them were silent for a few moments as they processed the gravity of what they were about to ask of some people. “But it’s no different than what we ask of every IDF officer, all the time. We all signed up for this,” said Zivic. It felt like he was trying to convince himself.

  “You’re not wrong. Volunteering for IDF? Sure. Dangerous. But ordering someone directly to their deaths is different, Ethan. We all may die. We all will die, eventually. Hell, it’s likely most of us will die in battle in the coming weeks and months. It’s a miracle any of us are still alive at all, given what we’ve been through. I’m a walking miracle myself, having been through Swarm War Two, and the war we just finished. But serving and fighting knowing you have a shot at success is different than fighting knowing you’ve been ordered to your death. It’s something we have to be absolutely goddamn sure is necessary.”

  “Is it, Admiral?” asked Urda.

  She paused, and slowly nodded. “I believe it is.” She released her tight grip on the console, as if she’d finally made her decision and needed to be at peace with it—to fool herself into feeling at peace with it, at least. “You two gentlemen are tasked with assembling the damaged ships for the fleet and getting it into some kind of fighting shape, and coming up with some kind of strategy for the battle. We’ve got less than a day, so you need to be miracle workers.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” said Zivic. Urda nodded likewise.

  “And me?” She sighed. “I’ll be the one to go ask people to die.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Britannia Sector

  Donnelly Station

  Interstellar One

  Bridge

  President Sepulveda never changed his mind. Not for his own chief of staff. Not for anyone. Changing your mind willy-nilly didn’t inspire confidence. Didn’t inspire people to vote for you, much less like you.

  The one time in recent memory he’d changed his mind was just a few months ago, he remembered now, as Interstellar One pulled up alongside Donnelly Station. The gas giant Calais was just a small bright dot, almost ninety degrees away from the sun, weak at this distance. It was right here that he’d changed it.

  He’d been wrong about Proctor. He’d assumed she was responsible for his predecessor’s death. He’d allowed himself to be swayed by Admiral Oppenheimer and that prick General Mullins, God rest his traitorous little soul.

  But seeing the unthinkable destruction of Britannia first-hand gave him a change of heart. Having a front row seat at the resurrection of Captain Tim Granger aboard the Skiohra generation ship Benevolence gave him a change of heart. The events of that day—he’d never, ever forget.

  And he’d been a hero! They’d needed the presence of Vishgane Kharsa in order to open that secret door on the Benevolence, leading to the room that housed the AI robot and the incubation chambers that made Granger’s new body, and he’d delivered. In the middle of a war, he crossed two sets of enemy lines to go to the Dolmasi homeworld and managed to convince Kharsa to join him at Calais.

  And yet here he was, off on some foolhardy quest to be even more of a hero. Heroism wasn’t enough. Especially when the voters never saw it for themselves. He needed to be a legend. Like Granger. Then he’d be remembered.

  And so the last words out of his mouth to his chief of staff before he left Earth were, “Eat shit.” Sukarno had tried, again, to change his mind about this trip.

  Legends don’t change their minds. Especially not by excessively nervous chiefs of staff.

  “Sir, we’re docked,” said Lieutenant Peel. “Shall I call over and have whoever you want to talk to just come over here? We could set up the conference room.”

  He waved him off and stood. “No, that won’t be necessary. I need the walk after a few hours of sitting.”

  He left the bridge, Secret Service detail in tow. And that’s it. Just the three of them. It felt so good to be almost alone. No staff or aides or officials trailing after him. His comms team and political team had both gone on ahead to Bolivar to set up his campaign stop. And thank god, they took the presidential press pool with them. Meanwhile, he was finally getting his hands dirty.

  The door at the end of the airlock opened, revealing the station’s commander standing at attention. “Mr. President, sir! I’m Commander Felt. To what do we owe the honor?”

  Good. He liked the man already—didn’t mince words on small talk, but rather got straight to the point.

  “I need your help with some data you may have.”

  “I see,” said Commander Felt. “Anything in particular?”

  Sepulveda explained the situation, holding back some critical info like the Avery note, but telling just enough to allow Felt to know what kind of files they might be after.

  “Right this way, sir.”

  He was led through the main central promenade of the station, then a maze of corridors, each of which had several closed doors. All server rooms, according to Commander Felt. “Each one responsible for a different subset of the millions of data streams we receive here. And you wouldn’t believe the heat we generate. Every square inch of the station’s exterior is covered by radiative heat exchangers.”

  Sepulveda waved air toward his face. “Hmm. Seems pretty cool to me right now. Something up with the servers?”

  Felt went silent for a moment and hesitated to answer, and that’s when Sepulveda knew the answer before even hearing it.

  Britannia had been the source for most of those data streams. “Well, you see, we don’t actually process much new data any more. Just from Wellington shipyards at Calais, and whatever other ships pass through the system. But we do keep a pretty steady eye on the debris from Britannia. We basically got drafted as the main observation site for that. Optical, radio, microwave, meta-space—just about every band you can think of in as high a resolution as possible, all aimed at that big angry red cloud where Britannia used to be.”

  He was led into a small room. Commander Felt made a motion with his thumb toward the door, and two technicians who’d been sitting at the control station promptly retreated to the corridor outside. “You guys too, please,” said Sepulveda, nodding toward his Secret Service detail and looking at the door.

  “Sir,” one of them began.

  “Not having this argument right now. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Danforth you had your eyes on me the entire time.”

  Th
ey both left reluctantly, presumably standing guard outside the door.

  “Right. Let’s get started, shall we?” Sepulveda sat down and motioned for Felt to take the other seat. “Of course, everything we discuss is classified top secret. I’ve been told IDF provided security for former President Avery right up until her death when Britannia blew. I want whatever we’ve got from that. Visitor logs. Her use of Interstellar Two. Reports from her security detail. Everything.”

  Felt swiveled his chair to face the console, and Sepulveda settled in for what he assumed would be at least ten minutes of waiting.

  “Got it.”

  “It?”

  “I think so. The entire data stream, right up until eight thirty-two and twelve seconds local time where her residence was located. Got video for you too if you want.”

  “Video?” He couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Yeah. Mostly of the exterior estate. But a few inside too. You want all of it?”

  “Absolutely. Give me, oh, the last week of her life. Right up to the moment Britannia blew.”

  “Got it.” Felt waved through a few menus and tapped a few buttons here and there. “To your data pad?” he asked, indicating the device in Sepulveda’s pocket.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  One last tap of a button, and it was all done. “And there you go. Six hundred fifty terabytes headed your way, sir.”

  Sepulveda had started to stand up, but paused halfway. “Six hundred . . . ?”

  “And fifty terabytes, yes, sir.”

  My god, he thought, that’ll take ages to sift through. “Is . . . that a lot?”

  Commander Felt shrugged. “Depends on who you ask. We generate thousands of times that in a normal day here.”

  “But, for my staff and I to sift through?”

  “Yeah.” Felt looked a little flushed, and Sepulveda sat back down. “Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Narrow it down.”

  “I’d say. Yes, narrow it down, please.”

  Felt nodded vigorously, his lips bunched together and his brow furrowed, as if mentally browbeating himself for such a blunder in front of the leader of half of humanity. “Okay. Let’s narrow this down a bit.”