Exodus

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “I can honestly say that I haven’t, Doctor. Unfortunately, just because I haven’t heard anything about it doesn’t mean that the information didn’t reach the White House. Not everything that comes in these days actually reaches my desk and it wouldn’t shock me if your theory was correct. It’s possible that I have a staffer who has been fielding the communications. I’ll look into it right away and contact you as soon as I know anything at all. In the mean-time, I’d like you to continue your efforts. You have a keen mind and I trust you to use it. If there is someone out there who is going to threaten the construction of this ship they must be stopped. There isn’t time for error.”

  “Of course, Madam President.” We said our goodbyes and I signed off. Fantastic. The problem with video chats was that I could only get a decent read on someone’s tone and truthfulness. It afforded me the benefit of being able to look them in the eye but I completely lost body language. I also couldn’t see the rest of the environment. For all I knew the President was being coerced into saying those things. We were back exactly where we started. Just me and Jackson against the world.

  12

  Jackson

  I stared at the phone for a moment, confused. Clearly, I had pissed off the doctor, but I had no idea why. Women. When I returned to the room where I had left the beam cannon I was amused to find my soldiers in the same position I left them in. They stood as tall and still as statues and it was a treat to watch every human in the room constantly checking over their shoulders at their predatory guests. Proctor’s security chief strode through the doors moments after I did, his breath coming quickly as if he had run from another part of the building.

  “Mr. Proctor has been called away on important business,” he said. “I am to inform you that I and any of my staff are at your disposal to help in the investigation.”

  I clenched my jaw. The implications of the statement were clear; they didn’t want us here, but they also didn’t have a lot of choices. For now, they would play along.

  “Mr. Cady, let’s talk.” I motioned him towards a table where one of my soldiers joined us at my right-hand side. This was for practicality’s sake, of course. The fact that it happened to serve as an enjoyable intimidation tactic was just a bonus. “First on the agenda is that I need a comprehensive view of your security. Camera feeds, identification scanners, the works. If someone takes a whiz in this place, I need to know about it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cady didn’t look particularly happy to be of service. No doubt he and Proctor had a conversation of their own in the other room. “Each room in the main building is outfitted with at least a single high-definition camera and two microphones, with the exception of Mr. Proctor’s office, of course. Secure areas are locked down with handprint and iris scanners. Outsiders are required to produce federal or state identification and are searched before entering any secure areas. Essentially, it should be impossible for anyone to bring anything in, or out.”

  “Clearly, ‘should’ being the operative word here. Any ideas on how they’ve been pulling it off?”

  Cady shook his head. “Honestly, if we had the slightest idea, we’d have stopped the leaks before they became this much of an issue.” He pulled out a tablet and made a few gestures on the screen. When he turned it around there were three photos, two men and a woman. “These are three employees who were fired recently. If you’re looking to the ‘disgruntled employee’ idea as motivation, these would be the people I would look into. The man on the left and the woman on the right both worked in secure areas. The man in the middle was a low-level worker—a janitor. He might have had access into secure areas to take the trash out but we would have noticed if he was poking through anything he shouldn’t have been.”

  I asked Cady to send the data to my tablet and took a moment to review the information. The people who worked in the secure areas were brilliant. The man, Javier Martin according to his dossier, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton at the tender age of sixteen. He then followed it up by going straight into a doctorate program at MIT and a post-doc at Cambridge. A rocket scientist through and through. The woman, Lynette York, had a similar background. Her specialty appeared to be electrical engineering. Fifteen years combined on the development teams for two major technology companies. I was impressed to read that she was one of the founding members of Raygem, a company that had been responsible for the leaps in battery technology that made the flyby of Mars possible. Big names for big roles, they must have messed up in a major way to get fired from this project.

  The second man had fewer letters after his name. Jamison Wallace, an immigrant from Canada. He had been living in the U.S. for a little over a decade. Pretty standard history, though I noted that he did have an arrest record. Two counts of grand theft, though he only served three years in total.

  As obvious as it was to look at the guy with the record for purloining valuables as the culprit, I doubted that the janitor would have the skills, patience, or resources to pull this off. The others would certainly have the means and depending on why they were fired, the motivation to leak the information.

  Cady waited quietly as I finished reading the information he had provided. I felt the soldiers getting restless behind me. They were trained to stand for as long as needed but after the past couple of days, I could understand a little discomfort and impatience. I turned to the group and dismissed all but one of them, a sergeant that I had become close to over my time with the aliens. One of the soldiers reached to zip the cannon back into the bag. He hefted the weapon up and rested it across his chest as he carried it from the room. The rest of the soldiers retreated from the office, following another intern. I chuffed after the group and clicked my tongue. “Don’t be mean,” I called. The soldier at the end of the line turned towards me and grinned. As he turned around, he stamped his feet a little harder and chuckled as the intern jumped.

  “Mr. Cady, if you’d be so kind.”

  The security chief nodded and stood. He took us through the rest of the administrative offices. They bore a strong resemblance to pretty much every other office in the world, with bland cubicles festooned by their occupants with photos and stuffed animals in an attempt at individualism. Next on the list was the assembly lines. I noticed that we were very deliberately kept off the factory floor. Cady claimed that this was for safety reasons and “as to not disturb the assembly process.” I suspected that it had more to do with the hulking alien soldier walking behind us than disturbing the hundreds of workers keeping their heads down.

  “When do your workers come in each day?” I asked.

  “Around 9 a.m.,” Cady answered. I wasn’t in love with the approximation. A secure facility should operate like a well-made clock. Precisely.

  “How do they enter the facility?”

  “There is an entrance located in the northwest corner of the factory building. They can enter there, and only through there, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. every day. The night shift breaks for their breakfast at 8 a.m. before leaving for the day.”

  “And what security measures are there to verify the workers?” Jesus, getting answers out of this man was like pulling teeth. He and Proctor had pledged cooperation but every question I asked got the minimum answer. As we walked, my sergeant tapped his claws against his leg. He had remained silent throughout the tour but I could tell that he wasn’t liking the answers we were getting any better than I was. The weapons storage was secured similarly to the assembly lines, but this one required a code in addition to the scanners. That certainly narrowed down who may have had access, but codes were problematic. Codes could be copied.

  I was starting to smell bullshit. Proctor and his goons certainly had the right to feel about the aliens however they wanted, but they were contracted to do a job. The problem was that I was no longer part of that contract. When I joined Ka’thak’s forces, I had given up my military standing. As difficult as it was to part with that aspect of myself, I realized now that I had also given up my humanity. To
these men, I might look like a human soldier in a strange uniform, but the reality was that they were treating me no differently than my alien comrades. I was dead, reborn into a race of people who would never return to this planet once they left.

  “Mind if I get some imaging, Mr. Cady?” If I could get away from the security director, I might be able to sift through the lies better. As it was, we were just wasting our time. I knew enough about security protocols to pinpoint that this wasn’t an outside hacker, this was an inside job. It didn’t make sense. Why would anyone want to put humanity’s only chance at survival at risk? It wasn’t like they could ever be paid enough to make it worth the effort. After all, you can’t take it with you.

  Given the stress of the situation and the sheer number of troops around I wouldn’t have been too surprised if a soldier lost it here or there but to have this kind of leak was unbelievable. I wasn’t an expert in motive, but this was beyond screwed up. My mind raced, trying to puzzle through what would make otherwise sensible humans take on a suicide mission. Whoever had hired them must have guaranteed some kind of refuge—or maybe they threatened to take it away. That would get me moving.

  13

  Alexandra

  I stepped into the command center of the ship and shivered. Even though the coup had been more than half a year ago, it still gave me the creeps to be in here. I could still imagine Turuk’s body on the floor in my mind, blood and brain seeping from a hole in the alien’s head. Nonetheless, this was where I had to be in order to address Ka’thak and the council.

  “Honored council, Commander Ka’thak, thank you for taking the time to see me today. I come to you with a request for help. Our teams have been scouring every available source of information for clues about who perpetrated this heinous attack against both our peoples. Thus far this has been a difficult task, as I am sure you can imagine.”

  There was murmuring from the council. It was obvious by now that there was some consternation from some of the older aliens towards me. They were less than enthusiastic about Ka’thak cooperating so readily with the human government and viewed me only as a member of that administration. The irony. Among humans, I had too much status. Here I had none. I understood, as much as I could. When you reach a certain age, it pays to be a little paranoid and overcautious. It wasn’t personal.

  I picked up the first of the bags. Just as when I had met with the human ambassadors, both electronic and physical evidence was required here. The delegate seated closest to me wrinkled her nose and snorted as I unzipped the duffle. Inside were two bloodied uniforms, one with a different layout than its sibling. The larger had belonged to one of the men wielding the particle beam weapons. After a few days in warm bags the traces of human flesh were starting to stink even to my nose. I lay the clothing on the table, arranging it carefully.

  “Kevlar fiber and ceramic body armor. This stuff isn’t cheap. Neither are the guns they brought.” I removed one of the rifles we had taken off the soldiers from the bag. “These are modified assault rifles that have been outfitted with more accessories than our experts had ever seen. They took a rifle that is meant to kill humans effectively and turned it into a meat grinder.”

  Next from the bags came a tablet taken from one of the bodies. Unfortunately for us, there was a large bullet hole through the middle of it. Our guys weren’t able to pull anything off the storage due to the damage. Flash-based memory can be a real pain.

  “Tablets for communication. Again this is beyond the level of available consumer technology. This stuff is military-grade hardware. Even if this one didn’t have a hole through the middle of it we wouldn’t be able to extract even a single piece of information. As far as our men can tell it’s protected by 512-bit encryption. It would take one of our supercomputers decades to crack that kind of defense.”

  In the second bag was one of the beam weapons. I had let David keep the other so he could show it to the folks down at AstroTech headquarters in Florida. I hefted the weapon up onto the table and stepped back for a moment, almost as if I were presenting the gun to the assembled aliens. Instead of the reaction I expected, there was utter silence.

  Then one of the council members spat a word in his own tongue. Another tightened her claws on the table, setting my teeth on edge. The group turned away from me to face Ka’thak. One by one, each alien spoke in a series of barks and snarls. Their feet pounded the floor in staccato bursts. As I watched the mounting argument I found myself unconsciously stepping away from the table and the gun. The way the aliens were reacting you would think that I brought a bomb into the room. Given that this was modeled after a piece of their own technology, perhaps I had.

  “Doctor,” Ka’thak held up a hand to silence the room and turned to address me directly. “How many do they have?”

  “I don’t know.” That was the wrong answer. More barks from the council.

  “We will assist you, of course. The rest of you, leave us.” A few council members opened their mouths to protest. “Leave. Now!” Ka’thak shouted. I tried to keep my face impassive as the recalcitrant council members skittered from their chairs and left. When the last one had closed the door behind them, I burst out laughing.

  The captain regarded me carefully. “This is no laughing matter, Doctor.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself as much as possible. “My apologies, Captain. It’s just that after everything that has gone on, watching a group of haughty old people be thrown out of a room by someone much younger is a genuinely funny sight to behold.”

  Ka’thak continued to stare and I met his gaze, trying my best to look genuinely apologetic. We held each other’s eyes for what felt like a full minute before his mouth twitched and he broke out in laughter. “I had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?” He laughed.

  “I hate you.”

  “Come now, after all we’ve been through?” He chuckled, shoving his shoulder playfully into my side. I stumbled from the force and rolled my eyes. No matter what species, at least the men were having fun today. I decided to join in their lightheartedness.

  “To business then?” It was a relief to have even a moment of joviality. We sat and Ka’thak spoke into a tablet built into the table. A young alien soldier appeared with a large gun in her hands. This resembled the rifles I had come to be so familiar with but after it was placed on the table I noticed similar canisters to the beam weapons underneath the outer case of the gun.

  “We’ve spent a considerable amount of time analyzing your weaponry since our arrival. We are aware that humanity has possessed the ability to develop particle beam weaponry for a couple of your decades now. We were not aware that you were in possession of handheld beam weapons, so I asked our scientists to look into it. The long and the short of it is this—the weaponry these men used to slaughter our soldiers emits a vastly different electromagnetic signature than ours.”

  “I kind of figured. Different planets, different science, different signatures. Why exactly is this useful?”

  “This is good news. It means that with detection, we can pinpoint where any other weapons of this kind are located. The only problem is that they have to be live, active, and armed, so our detection would only be useful a few minutes before an attack.”

  “It’s better than nothing. Advanced warning of any kind can mean lives saved. It also means that we can look into defense systems—if that’s even possible.”

  “Indeed.” Ka’thak had gone quiet. He rested his chin on his hands and stared blankly into the distance. I wasn’t sure what exactly tired looked like on an alien face, but he looked exhausted to me.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes, of course.” He snapped out of his trance. “Do you have the time now? I have two of our scientists standing by to go over our findings. We’d like to begin working on a detection system as soon as possible.”

  “Of course. Can I get you something, though? Food? Water? Alcohol?”

  Ka’thak smiled at the last suggestion.
>
  “I will be all right,” he said. “It’s been a long couple of months, Doctor.”

  “I know, friend. Bring in your scientists, let’s get to work.”

  Two scientists came into the chamber and laid out a series of flexible displays on the table. “We need satellite access, please,” one requested. This was one of the perks that came with my new position; requisitioning access to secure channels. I called my friends in central command and gave them the short version of the plan. The truth was that I could have just told them what to do and it would be done, but it was easier to be polite. That way when I needed something done that was out of their purview they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

  The solider I spoke to wasn’t thrilled that I hadn’t filled out the paperwork ahead of time, but grudgingly complied after I reminded him that I was set on this task personally by the President. After a couple of minutes, I was pinged for authentication on my tablet. As soon as I accepted, a stream of data popped up on my display, the code running by faster than I could even read.

  I handed the tablet to the scientist and watched as the other screens flickered to life. One showed a wireframe outline of the globe that spun slowly on an invisible axis. Dots of red-colored sections of each country as the globe spun, NASA’s passive scanning lighting up different kinds of radiation and electromagnetic frequencies that were constantly monitored. Another screen displayed a skeletal model of the United States with the same markings popping up all over the country. The third displayed a kind of control panel. The other scientist typed on the third display as the map zoomed in to different sections of the country, scanning each area before moving on.