The king was laughing wildly. He caught his breath momentarily and delivered a very understated “Boom,” before he resumed laughing as the mysterious soldiers disarmed and bound the captain and his crew.
“There were hundreds of crewmen on that ship!” the captain said through locked teeth.
“I know!” The king chuckled. “That’s why it’s so funny. You’re all alone now.”
“The Alliance will not stand for this!”
“Your Alliance will stand for anything I tell them to,” the king hissed. “I’ve just destroyed your mightiest ship. I have in my captivity their most decorated captain and his crew. Oh, and also, they’re a bunch of useless, powerless cowards.”
The king sauntered forward and leaned in with a broad smile. “They’ll do whatever I say.”
“You’re not going to find us to be the most agreeable prisoners, you cad.” Antarius made a show of struggling against his bonds. They were too strong to break. Even for him.
“Oh yes I will. If you so much as step out of line…” The king paused for dramatic effect. It was something he wasn’t particularly skilled at, and the pause lasted a beat too long. “…I’ll kill you.”
Captain Thurgood stopped struggling and straightened to his full height. He looked the king dead in the eyes like a man. “You haven’t got the guts.”
“Try me.”
“Johnson,” the captain called to one of his crew members.
Johnson stepped forward with a Shandoran guard in tow. “Yes, sir?”
“Step out of line, Johnson.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
Antarius locked his gaze on the king’s eyes. “Show this monster what we think of his empty threats.”
“But, sir,” Johnson argued. “I think he might mean it. I mean, he did just blow up the Peacebringer.”
“This coward?” Antarius laughed. “He hasn’t got the stones for it.”
“Sir, I’d rather no—”
“That’s an order, Johnson!”
Johnson looked around nervously at the king’s guards and the alien soldiers, then took a careful step forward.
The blast of the Shandoran rifle whined like a turbo spooling up and tore a hole through Johnson’s chest.
Ensign Johnson grimaced and collapsed at the feet of the soldier that had pulled the trigger.
“You monster!” the captain raged as he struggled against his restraints once more. “You’ll answer for the death of Johnson!”
“Okay, I’ve had enough of this,” the king said, and turned to the closest guard. “Shoot him with the stunny thing.”
The guard nodded and pulled a pistol from beneath her robe. It flashed green and the captain collapsed to the ground, unable to move.
2
Ever since their conception, committees had been a complete and total waste of time. The idea that several different people, representing several different positions, could ever do anything productive was optimism in its most misguided form. But now, after two hundred years of refinement, tinkering and applied psychology, they were not only a waste of time, they were also quite expensive.
The advent of holopresence technology had been a breakthrough in conference call inefficiency. One noted improvement, aside from the visible presence of otherwise absent members, was the hold music. It was still terrible, but thanks to the accompanying hologram of the associated band, it was easier to hate the tune in a much more specific way.
Unfortunately, the technology was a necessary evil, as the Earth Alliance Security Council’s very nature required representatives from multiple worlds, and these members could not be expected to be on-planet at all times given the difficulties and restrictions due to biological, temporal and golf-schedule differences.
As soon as Alani Worra stepped up to the door of the Security Council conference room, the central computer acknowledged her presence with a chime and announced her to the empty room.
“Welcome, Chairman Alani Worra. Chair of the Earth Alliance Security Council. You are the only participant at this time. If you are the leader, please enter your security code.”
As soon as she entered the room, she could tell that more members were holographing into the meeting than normal. The humidity slapped her in the face. The mist from the projectors was constant. The climate control did its best to balance the atmosphere in the room, but the fact that they were in the South Pacific didn’t help much. The floating city of Agora had, at one time, been a technological wonder. Its construction in the middle of the ocean had been hailed as a marvel of engineering and design. But muggy was muggy no matter how good the AC was.
Aside from a few holographs that had been placed on hold, Worra was alone in the room. She stared out the glass wall of the conference room over the ocean. The water beyond the floating city was filled with ships and aircraft skimming just above the surface of the calm sea. Agora had been constructed as a truly neutral territory for the nations of Earth to meet in the waning days of statehood, and had been a destination for the powerful and the wealthy ever since its founding.
Even from the top floor of the tower, the yachts that filled the harbor looked massive. The casino was always a beehive of activity, and the city was one of the few places left where physical shopping was preferred to placing orders on a molecular assembler. It was worth the inconvenience as long as people saw the things you were buying, and the retailers saw to it that the wares one could buy in Agora were available nowhere else.
Clouds formed well beyond the city because that’s where they were programmed to form. They would gather and grow before drifting off to water mainland crops and safely repeat the process until they were instructed to do otherwise. No storm would ever threaten the city.
The computer chimed as the others filed into the room behind her, and announced each of them by name and title. Worra kept her gaze on the sea until the casual greetings had passed and the general shuffling had ceased. More holopresence projectors fired up, and the glass in front of her began to fog over. She turned and addressed the room. “Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. As you all know, this is an emergency meeting so I’ll skip the pleasantries and get right to the crisis. There’s been an incident on Shandor.”
“Which Shandor?” inquired one of the delegates.
“The new one,” she replied.
“You said it was an incident?” asked another delegate.
“Yes.”
“Not an event? I thought we were calling them events now.”
“Events?” asked a man in a holograph. “What happened to happenings?”
“That happened to happenings,” explained another.
“I don’t follow.”
“We can’t call an event a happening because then people would be running around saying, ‘what happening happened’ or ‘what happened in this happening’ and then we’d all sound dumb.”
A woman at the end of the table leaned forward, pointing at a notepad. “I thought that’s why we talked about occurrence.”
“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” Worra said. “This particular instance is indeed an incident. The Peacebringer has been destroyed in orbit over the planet Shandor—planet CB4832957 per your file.”
“How did this happen? Fuel leak? Command failure?”
Gahn-dahrl asked the question. Of course it was him. Always looking to blame the Alliance for any mishap that befell the Alliance or anyone else. His world had joined the Alliance out of desperation a generation ago, and while they enjoyed their influence at the table, they were never enthusiastic about being a part of something larger than themselves.
“I’m afraid this was no accident,” Worra said. “The Peacebringer was shot down.”
With the exception of the whining holopresence projectors, the room was dead silent. The realizations grew slowly. And she understood. It had taken her time to wrestle with the fact that what had happened was even possible.
The delegate from Titan was the first to sp
eak. “Shandor has the capability to destroy a starship?”
“No,” she said sadly. “The Shandorans weren’t acting alone. It’s a new player. It appears we aren’t as unique in our development as we first thought.”
Chairman Worra nodded to the large screen in the conference room and played the message she had already watched a dozen times.
The alien appeared to be a humanoid male with ashen gray skin and short, dark hair that dropped into a widow’s peak above a heavy brow. He wore black military dress with red adornments and a chest full of decorative ribbons and symbols. Linguistics had converted his speech into English with some difficulty, but the voice they heard in the room was his own, hard and cold.
“People of the Earth Alliance, I am Rox Tolgath Malbourne of His Emperor’s Navy. For too long your Earthian Empire has labored under the delusion that it is the only true power in the galaxy. For too long you have spread among the stars like a festering disease, believing the conquest was your right. Today, your destiny changes.
“You have witnessed the might of the Righteous Empire. Your most powerful vessel has been destroyed. We hold in our possession the captain and his senior crew members. You are no longer the only power in the galaxy. You are no longer any kind of power in the galaxy. Your time has ended. The Righteous Empire demands that you pull what meager forces you possess back to Earth or they shall suffer the same fate. Prepare to succumb to the rightful rulers of the galaxy.”
The image froze on Malbourne’s final frown. The unknown enemy gazed at the council members as they did their best to adjust to this new development.
With a single blow, their world had come crumbling down. In more than two hundred years of exploration, the Alliance had discovered no other world capable of interplanetary flight. Only a handful had managed to escape the gravity of their own worlds, yet somehow this unknown power had developed the capability to wage war across the stars without being detected.
“What do we know about them?” Tina Finley, the Martian delegate, asked. Her tactician’s mind was ready to start formulating a plan.
Worra could offer no hope. “Nothing.”
“I think we know that they’re pretty full of themselves,” Krzen Polvt scoffed. “Righteous Empire. Where do they get off calling themselves righteous?”
“That’s just how it was translated,” Gahn-dahrl explained.
“I won’t be calling them that,” Polvt assured the room. “I move we form a committee to come up with a new name for these…”—he said ‘dlarianholdts,’ but it was translated to the room as—“…narcissists. And we shall not be kind.”
“What do we do?” another hologram asked. “What can we do?”
“One thing is for certain,” Worra said. “We must not give in to their demands.”
“I agree with Chairman Worra,” one of the holograms said. The delegate was purple with blue spots and was shaped roughly like an angry block of concrete. “We should pull our forces back to Earth.”
“That’s the exact opposite of what she said,” Finley said.
“No, it’s not. I—”
“Those are their exact demands.”
“Hear me out. We should pull our forces back to Earth to defend Earth. Not because he said so. But because it was our idea. That way, we’re not giving in to anything.”
Delegate Polvt agreed. “That makes sense.”
“We should pull our forces back,” another hologram concurred. “Until we know more.”
“But we’re doing it because we want to,” the angry concrete said. “I want to make that clear for the record.”
“Of course,” the other hologram agreed, and shifted their projection from blue to green to represent their vote on the motion.
The other holograms turned green as well as those present voted for the ‘Pull EA forces back to Earth but because it was our idea and not because they said so’ motion.
Worra was saddened by the instant collapse of fortitude but could not argue that more information was needed before they could act. They could make plans all day long, but with bad intelligence, they would be bad plans. “We do need to learn more about this new enemy. Where did they come from? How advanced are they?”
“Who are the hostages?” a hologram delegate asked.
It was there in the briefing. None of them had read it. None of them ever read the briefing. Even she had only skimmed the documents before the meeting. “Ensigns Johnson, Konditti, Sargsyan, Reynolds, Intan and Nowak. First Officer Stendak. And Captain…” she took a deep breath. “Oh, no.”
The doors to the conference room were kicked open, and the computer announced the name of the visitor and the man who had done the kicking. “Welcome, Harius Thurgood. CEO Thurgood Mining, Thurgood Industries, Thurgood Companies and Lone Rock Brewing. Chair of the Gelsian Council. Member in good standing of the Order of the Oxia Palsu. Fellow of Cassini. Chair of Friends to—”
“Shut that damn thing up!” Harius grumbled. He spoke like he walked—short bursts full of energy and purpose that made people either dive out of his way or hide.
“Mr. Thurgood, this is a closed session.” Worra spoke with all the authority she could muster.
“Cut the bureaucratic crap, Alani,” Harius said. “What is the situation with my son?”
Arguing protocol with this man would be a waste of time and patience. You didn’t become the richest man in the galaxy by playing by the rules. Worra sighed and answered him. “They call themselves the Righteous Empire. They have your son and his crew on Shandor. That’s all we know at the moment.”
“That’s all you know?” Harius repeated. “You’re the damned security council. You know more than that.”
“We are working on it,” Alani assured him.
“Working on it? What are you doing to get my son back? What are any of you doing to rectify this situation?”
“Actually, sir,” the delegate from Titan said, “it’s an incident.”
“My foot kicking your ass is an incident, son. This is a damn catastrophe! Tell me you have a plan.”
Delegate Finley spoke up. “We do. We’re pulling the fleet back to Earth.”
“What? Why in the hell would you do that?” Thurgood asked.
“Because we want to,” Krzen Polvt explained. “Not because they said so.”
“Pull it back? You should be going in guns blazing!”
“We can’t, Harius,” Worra said softly. “We don’t know what we’re facing here. This is the first time we’ve encountered another species capable of interstellar travel. We have no idea what they’re capable of.”
“They’re capable of dying, aren’t they? Get in there and get my son!”
“Harius, I understand your concern, but the Peacebringer was our most advanced ship and they brought it down with little effort. And you know that our navy is no longer poised for battle, but peace.”
“I told those fools it was a mistake to draw down,” Thurgood said.
“We haven’t needed a military force in 50 years, Harius.”
“Until right this moment. It was shortsighted and now it looks like I’m the one who gets to pay the price.”
“With all due respect,” a young delegate spoke up, “there were a lot of families on that ship, sir. They all paid the—”
The delegate was silenced with a single look from the interstellar magnate. The young man withdrew into the bolsters of his chair and tried to disappear.
“So, you’ll do nothing?” Thurgood asked Alani.
“We’re doing everything we can, Harius,” Worra said. “We have little choice but to negotiate.”
Harius drew in his bluster and delivered his position with a chilling calm. “My son will not be a bargaining chip. And I will not stand by while he is being held by God knows what on that shithole of a planet.” Thurgood turned to leave.
“You will do exactly that!” Worra spoke with a courage that surprised even her.
Harius stopped. When he turned back to face her,
he was smiling. “Look at you, Alani. Are you finally growing into that uniform?”
She was powerful. Few in the Alliance outranked her. But Thurgood wasn’t in the Alliance. He was more than her equal, and she knew very well that he could take everything from her with a couple of rounds of golf with the right people. But she stood tall and exercised her authority nonetheless. “I know you, Harius. I know what you’re capable of. But this council expressly forbids you from taking any action on this matter. You’ll have to put your faith in the Alliance.”
Harius Thurgood doubled over in laughter and fell into one of the chairs occupied by a hologram. The delegate disappeared and Thurgood slapped the table. “The same Alliance that sent him into the hands of the enemy?”
“We have to work through diplomatic channels on this one. There is more at stake here than just your son. You have to let us do our jobs.”
The man, one of the most powerful in the galaxy, stood up and stared into her eyes. She wanted to look away but she held his gaze. She read determination in his look. The same determination that had made him successful and powerful and wealthy was now turned on her. However, he blinked first.
“Fine,” he said. “You send your people. You get my son back.”
“We will do our best,” Worra said. “But I need your word that you won’t do anything stupid.”
“You have it.” Harius Thurgood smiled. “Nothing stupid.”
3
Cason Maze was about to jump off the roof of a building, and he really didn’t want to. It had always been part of the plan, but it wasn’t until he stood at the edge and looked over that he was willing to admit that it wasn’t a very good plan.
Shattered Alliance Page 2