The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  All three men looked grim.

  "They can't perform the Hajj without it, gentlemen," she reminded them. "Unless you want to start letting pilgrims travel to Earth from al-Saḥra'."

  "Would they settle for their own Black Stone if we could find a similar artifact?" asked Wolff, seriously. "That's the only thing preventing them from creating their own Kaaba. And we know now that the Black Stone is a big piece of pumice. I don't know that anyone has ever run down where the pumice came from, but I imagine the current curators of the site would allow a modern non-destructive scan."

  "We could go back and find out," pointed out von Barronov.

  "Yeah . . . no."

  "I could tell you," offered Ariela.

  They all looked at her again.

  "Honey," said Wolff, gently, "do you intend to perform the Hajj?"

  "Um. No?" said Ariela, hesitantly. "I was thinking more along the lines of maybe flying over it in Tumtum, and checking out its Mesh characteristics."

  Buford shook his head. "No-fly zone, fifty-mile radius. They even get a little annoyed when we overfly in LEO." He chuckled. "Can't really blame 'em; we did threaten to KKW the city back in the day, and they have long memories of that."

  Ariela looked annoyed. "Very well, then." She closed her eyes. "Where is Mecca from here?"

  Wolff looked at von Barronov, who was tapping on one of the SCIF's secure research holotabs. It had been recognized, decades before, that just because one was in a SCIF didn't mean one didn't sometimes need to do some research, and it wasn't worth the trouble to open the SCIF, run to a computer, do that research, run back, and close the SCIF again.

  Being in a SCIF, of course, the research system wasn't connected to the public hypernet, but rather to a massive subset "chunk" of it running on computers internal to the SCIF itself. When the SCIF was shut down, the computers would update the "chunk" through a rather ingenious cutout system that used a combination of internal networks, VPNs, and IPv9 addresses that weren't routable from the outside back to the SCIF unless they saw outbound traffic from the research system first. The antivirus and antimalware suites were extremely suspicious of anything they were set to review. And the encryption schemes used were effectively uncrackable by anything other than Beam himself. (Wolff had asked. Beam had cracked them in about a minute and a half, though he admitted they were definitely the toughest he'd ever seen.)

  It still wasn't 100% secure, more like 99.9999999999%, but that's why the research system within the SCIF was locked down tight when it wasn't being updated, and didn't have any connection at all to the AI they'd used earlier to open the compartment, play the holo of the meeting with Beam and the Xzl5!vt, and record the proceedings of the present gathering. On top of that, the research system was intentionally deaf and blind to anything but keystrokes on a virtual holotab keyboard.

  "10,655 kilometers, compass bearing 67.34 degrees east of northeast," said von Barronov.

  "Hmm . . . would have been easier to go straight through instead of Great Circle . . . but I have it . . . and man is that thing a mess . . . what is all this cement mortar? Hmm . . . very porous, yes, cinder or pumice, volume is not all that much, mass is low and density is lower . . . it would float . . . why is the surface so shiny?"

  "They touch it, and if possible, they kiss it," Wolff told her. "For hundreds of years. Because the Prophet allegedly did."

  "Eww! Okay, I think I have what I need," Ariela said, opening her eyes again. "Let me check the holotab." She started pecking away at her secure 'tab's virtual keyboard, frowned, then tapped some more, and smiled.

  "Short of doing a real scan, best guess is the Harrat Lunayyir volcano west of Medina," she said. "There may have been a volcanic eruption there as recently as the 10th Century, A.D, which is late for the supposed origin of the stone, but it could have happened earlier."

  "I hate that she can do that," said Fox, grinning. "On the other hand, she could always find the kids' lost stuff."

  Ariela punched him in the arm. "You."

  "So if we get you a piece of that, do you think you can close the deal?" asked Buford.

  "All I can do is ask," shrugged Ariela.

  "I have faith in your abilities," grunted Buford. "In that case, this meeting is adjourned. Oh, wait." He looked at Wolff. "It's your meeting. You say that."

  "Say what?"

  "Meeting is adjourned."

  "It is?"

  Buford sighed. "Asshole."

  Wolff grinned. "I can't help it when you feed me straight lines." He looked at the holoprojector. "SCIF, eject my data chip, sweep memory, close the compartment."

  "Done," said the SCIF's AI, and the chip popped out of the data slot. "Compartment is closed, SCIF memory is cleared, this room is now insecure." The SECURE signs turned off and the door unlatched.

  "I'm for a drink," said Buford. "Who's with me?"

  The vote was unanimous, and they crowded into the elevator for the short ride back to his office.

  ◆

  "When did the Intelligence Division become the Intelligence Directorate?" asked Ariela, comfortably ensconced with her glass in one of the big overstuffed chairs in Buford's office.

  "When the 1st Space Force Marines outgrew the frigates, and spawned new battalions, and two new divisions to hold them," said Buford. "Clearly it wasn't a 'division', and calling it a division was a misnomer anyway, since all it had were a few fire teams to do investigative work. So we talked about it and decided 'directorate' had a nice, 'don't fuck with us' ring. Plus, we didn't have to change the initials on all our stuff; it's still SFMID. And it still sits in the org chart pretty much where it always did, under the direct supervision of the SFM commandant . . . which right now is me." He looked at Wolff. "And your dad is the Assistant Commandant of the SFM, which means in addition to his intelligence work, he's got day-to-day oversight of the space-borne Corps."

  Ariela choked. When she got control of her voice back, she asked, "When did that happen?"

  "About a week ago," said Wolff, "and the notices haven't gotten all the way through the system, which is why nobody on al-Saḥra' had the word, yet. Lieutenant General Patterson decided to retire again, along with his lady wife this time, and the only reason I haven't taken over is because we have sufficient workload in the ID at this time that I can't just break away. I think we have things planned so Chris will take over for me and I will take the SFM commandant's hat from John at that point." He sighed. "In maybe six or eight months, I suppose."

  "Don't hurry none on my account," said von Barronov, grinning.

  "Comes with a free promotion to lieutenant general."

  "Just what I need, another star."

  "Why all the work?" asked Ariela, mostly to break up the back-and-forth.

  "We seem to have a lot of pirates, lately," replied Wolff. "Sixty-odd colonies out there and a fair amount of shipping between them, and a fair number of pirates fucking with it. Not en route, of course, but inside the systems themselves when ships break out of warp and run sublight to the stations and planets. It's possible – well, we've heard rumors – that some of the pirates are Shizzle, so we have an ongoing liaison with the Shizzle's space navy intelligence group to try to keep tabs on what's going on in both of our spheres of influence."

  Ariela's eyes narrowed. "Nobody has asked me to talk to them."

  "It's not at that level, yet," interjected Buford. "If it gets that high, never fear, you'll get immediate orders temporarily detaching you, Fred, and the Tumtum to go play diplomat."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Buford shrugged. "It's what we do. The thing is, nobody wants to get the governments involved directly, because any plans we make will leak and the pirates will have better information about themselves than we do. I'm not criticizing governments, it's just the way bureaucracies work."

  "Right."

  "By the way," said von Barronov, "we've fitted more guns to the Bandersnatch because of this piracy shit. All controlled from the turret, or you can break th
em out to an optional, plug-in station that can be mounted on and used from one of the regular seats. BaeNorGrumLockMart have the plans and materials; you should do the same with Tumtum, as soon as you have a chance. It's about a three-day refit because they have to upgrade the fusion burner again."

  "We'll call them after we leave here today," promised Fox. "Thanks."

  "No Rods from God, yet?" asked Ariela, smiling.

  "Actually, funny you should ask," replied von Barronov, "because I had some ideas about that last month, and have been working on a prototype. Not full-blown Pournelle-3 Mark 5 THOR systems with boost, but something that can take a twelve-inch long, half-inch diameter tungsten rod and kick it out at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light – which your enemy will not appreciate when it hits and vaporizes him."

  "Sounds fun."

  "Yep, I figure two of them on an RV-slash-pinnace, port and starboard, and they should be able to carry magazines with a hundred war shots each. It's figuring out how to rearrange the below-deck service module to hold them that's slowing things up. That thing is already pretty jammed with important stuff."

  "Like space suits."

  He laughed. "Ah, you remember."

  She nodded. "We have two in the same storage locker aboard Tumtum, even though technically they're not part of the official load-out for a pinnace. Never hurts to have something around for an emergency."

  "Well, true enough. But the system is not small and we just haven't been able to miniaturize other systems enough to fit the mini-rods in."

  "Plus, we haven't actually got a prototype working, anyway," added Wolff. "They keep blowing up on us. Can't handle the strain, I guess."

  "But we'll get it!"

  "Yeah. Sure. One of these fine days."

  "So what are you doing about the piracy?" asked Ariela. "I know that's probably SFMID stuff, but . . . "

  "No big deal," replied Buford. "It seems that whenever a civilization gets to the point where it really isn't that hard to get one's hands on transport, and weapons, piracy rears its ugly head. Sometimes I guess that's not a bad thing; some dashing English ship captains were, after all was said and done, little more than pirates, and they did a number on Spanish shipping that all but bankrupted the Spanish Empire. Drake is the most famous example, of course. But others who started out as privateers ended up as pirates. I won't say we have Space Force officers disappearing and later popping up in commercial vessels with guns tacked on, but someone is certainly out there teaching the pirates to fly warp. The Shizzle had the same problem – have the same problem, I suppose I should say, since they've been battling them almost ever since they got into space." He sighed.

  Wolff took up the narrative. "We lost a few ships, early on – not large ones, more the size of corvettes – and we assumed they were lost in accidents, going into or coming out of warp, or just plain old mechanical failure. But then they started showing up again a few years later, and it was clear they'd been pirated by their crews – or factions within them – and were now lurking in the outer areas of systems waiting for commercial freighters or liners to come out of warp. As you know, where ships come out of warp is a simple function of which direction they were coming from, and how far from major planets they are. You can run Warp One inside a system, but if you make a larger singularity, say for a Warp Five exit from Earth, that could potentially perturb the orbits of both Earth and the Moon, as well as the orbital stations and even the other ships. So for safety's sake, we require the interstellars to leave Earth or any of the other planets at no more than Warp One, and to hit higher warp numbers after they pass through the Kuiper Belt. Coming back, we require them to slow down to Warp One at the Kuiper Belt, and when they pass the orbit of Neptune, they're required to go sub-light. Other systems have similar restrictions."

  "I've flown both the Bandersnatch and Tumtum at Warp One, in-system, and nobody ever told me I couldn't," protested Ariela.

  Wolff nodded. "The pinnaces can be flown that way; they're small and at Warp One, they don't require large enough singularities to do damage. So we allow that for a very small number of Space Force ships only. And on occasion," he grinned, "we even allow a corvette or a frigate to do so, for short distances. But these big cruisers and battleships we're looking at building? Not gonna happen. They're too big."

  "So when you ask 'what are we doing about the piracy,'" chimed in von Barronov, "we're finding ways to make it harder to pirate our ships – particularly the liners – and we're putting Space Force Marines aboard even the smaller vessels. Corvettes no longer rely on their own security, they have two squads of Space Marines aboard. We've – or rather, senators and congressmen sympathetic to Space Force – have rammed a law through Congress that makes gross acts of piracy in space punishable by death by spacing, no proceedings other than a trial by the Captain and two of his officers sitting as a court required. It does a certain amount of damage to due process," he said, shrugging, "but we feel we need to make a point, and typically a pirate isn't all that hard to identify, and is generally caught red-handed. And finally, Space Force has been given authority to shoot to disable on sight any ship failing to properly exchange IFF credentials, under the assumption it's a pirate vessel or has been taken over by pirates."

  "Shoot to disable?"

  "Hole 'em through the singularity drive."

  "Ah."

  "Then we take 'em in tow back to Sol, which we've learned to do better since Apophis, the Proven in Battle, and the Lotus Flower."

  Ariela laughed, remembering the episode with the Xzl5!vt cruiser Proven in Battle. "I should hope you've learned to do better."

  "Yeah, we wrote a whole SOP," Wolff told her. "It's online if you want to read it."

  "Later, perhaps. But I have a question about the summary executions."

  "Go on," said Buford.

  "Are you doing any interrogation before dumping them out the airlocks?" asked Ariela. "Something has got to be behind all of this. It seems too organized not to have some central point."

  "We are," replied von Barronov. "The problem is, most of them don't know anything about any organization, or, more to the point, we believe it exists but they're being very tight-lipped about it. I could buy a brotherhood of silence, I suppose, a code of omertà if you will, because what's the point of talking if you're going to be spaced?" He was thoughtful, for a moment. "Maybe we need to start offering life at hard labor or something, rather than spacing them out of hand, in return for actionable intel. If it's really a code of silence, though, I don't expect the offer to loosen any tongues."

  "What's really bad, though," noted Wolff, "is the pirating of vessels as they come out of warp for no reason other than pillaging them and kidnapping the young females, and sometimes even the young males. You may say that's pretty much the essence of piracy, but if they succeed in overpowering the crews, they don’t scuttle the ships in those cases; they turn them back over to their crews when they've finished their 'business' and allow them to continue on to port. The pillage is one thing, the kidnapping makes me wonder just what the hell is going on – because I think there's more to it than simple rape or enslavement. And I'm sure they let the ships go in the hope they'll come back for more. There isn't an infinite number of liners plying the spaceways, you know."

  "You think they've found a habitable world they're keeping on the down-low, and it's become something of a pirates' haven," mused Fox. "And the kidnappings are to build up their colonies, provide wives and/or concubines for the pirates, and turn the young men into something like Janissaries . . . or worse."

  Wolff nodded. "Indeed. Take the worst you can imagine and it's probably even more horrific, but who knows. And we won't, till we figure out where their galactic Tortuga is."

  "I can understand the code of silence," said Ariela, quietly. "Even with the executions, they probably figure things would not go well for their friends and families if they ratted out our 'Tortugans', and it got back to them." She shrugged. "If we're going to assume Maf
ia-like motives, we might as well go all the way."

  "Ari, can you track ships through warp?" asked von Barronov.

  She thought about it, reached out a little as an experiment, got nothing, and shrugged. "I doubt it. Even if I could track a ship through a warp entrance – which might be possible, since it would make a dent in the Mesh – once it gained speed and distance, I'd never be able to keep up. As it is, I don't think I can see much past the orbit of Jupiter, from here. So if they're pirating the ships out in the Kuiper halo when they come out of warp, I really wouldn't have a chance of seeing them anyway."

  "So we need to start interrogating harder, and offering the life at hard labor alternative to being spaced if they offer us any actionable intelligence," said Wolff, looking at Buford. "Can we get Congress to amend the law slightly, or do you think we have sufficient discretion under the Code as written?"

  Buford shook his head. "It's not in the UCMJ. It's in 18 USC 81, which covers piracy and privateering. Section 1651 originally said the crime of piracy on the high seas is punishable by life imprisonment, and there are other sections that further define who is a pirate, what constitutes piracy, and so forth. All of them state that piracy is punishable by life imprisonment. However, what we got several years ago was an additional section 1662, to add a paragraph specifically covering space piracy. It states, "Whoever, in interplanetary or interstellar space, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards captured by any space-going vessel, either military or commercial, commissioned under the United States, shall be tried immediately by the commanding officer of the said vessel and two other senior officers, and upon being found guilty, be forthwith executed without appeal by exposure to the vacuum of space."

  "Wow," exclaimed Ariela. "Damage to due process, indeed! How did they get that past the Supreme Court?"

  "We were lucky. A big liner was pirated just coming out of warp out around Neptune, not long after the new law went into effect, and the crew and the passengers were able to defeat the pirates, but it went hand-to-hand and was pretty bloody in the corridors, as I understand. The medics were busy and the passengers, of course, took lots of photos that ended up going viral on blogs and social media when they got back to Earth.