by Nick Webb
“Okay. Well, I’m sure there’s something you want to be doing. We can keep your presence on board a secret easy enough. May as well be doing something at the same time.”
“I understand the good Admiral gave you a mission as well?” President Sepulveda sat down in the captain’s chair, to Zivic’s annoyance.
“She did. Figure out what happened here at Bellarus. Though at this point it’s not much of a mystery anymore. Russian Confederation separatists. Freedom fighters trying to liberate Bellarus from RC control.”
Sepulveda’s right eyebrow raised up. “Interesting. Have we actually seen these freedom fighters? Did they have ships? Or are we just trusting the word of an injured RC fighter pilot?”
“Well, no, we don’t have footage of the attack. But we can go to the site of the battle in orbit and look at a few of their ships—they lost a couple in the attack.”
Sepulveda nodded. “Do it.”
Zivic motioned to the helm. “You heard the man.”
The minutes ticked by, and soon enough the helmsman announced, “Arrived at the debris field from the battle, sir. Most of it has scattered, but there are a few semi-intact ships here.”
“Put it up so we can see, Ensign,” said Zivic.
The ensign fiddled with the controls on his dashboard, and soon the view screen lit up with the panoramic view of the debris field.
Sepulveda stood up. “Zoom in on that one there.” He pointed out a medium-sized starship, carbon scoring all along its hull and half the starboard side missing. The viewscreen adjusted so it filled the screen. He stood there a long time, staring at it.
“Mr. President?” said Zivic.
“Can we confirm that is one of the separatist ships and not from the Bellarus military?”
Lieutenant Commander Rice nodded. “I checked the Bellarus government registry and this doesn’t match any of their fleet’s ship designs.”
“My god,” said Sepulveda.
“Mr. President?” Zivic repeated.
“That ship. I know it.” He finally turned around. His face was a mixture of anger and anxiety. “Two of them nearly killed me. Blew Interstellar One out of the sky.” He returned to the captain’s chair. “Mr. Zivic, your mission just got a hell of a lot more interesting.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sol System
Earth, Lower Manhattan
“You remember that taco truck on Bolivar? The Tiny Butterfly, or whatever it’s called?”
Liu nodded, taking the final bite of her al pastor taco. “La Mariquita Achispada?”
“That’s a mouthful. Tipsy Ladybug, right. Well I have to say, I know it’s a chain, but you just can’t beat Taco’s n’ More.”
She snorted. “So you’re saying you’re an unrefined peasant? What’s next, Delicioso-lite beer?”
“Hey. Don’t yuck my yum.”
“It’s not hard.”
He chuckled and tossed his dripping wrapper into the recycler tube on the street corner. “You ready? Our shuttle is almost here.”
She shook her head in annoyance, and tossed her wrapper too. “Tell me again why we’re taking a private hired shuttle instead of our own presidential corvette? Visiting the grave of Abraham Haws will probably look mighty suspicious, given all . . . this.” She swept her arm around her to indicate the Findiri occupation and the fact that their leader claimed to be none other than Commander Abraham Haws, who died aboard the ISS Constitution in Swarm War Two.
He started off toward the landing pad down the street. “You’re the former intel operative.”
“Exactly. And I can tell you you’re not fooling anyone by taking a private vehicle. May as well keep everything above board—or at least give the appearance of keeping it above board. Taking a private shuttle? That’s like jumping up and down waving your arms and yelling, Hey look at me! Right here! I don’t want you to see where I’m going!”
He silently kept walking. “Agree to disagree.”
“Oh god, you’re impossible.”
“Admit it, it’s why you like me.” He said it in jest, but felt something was off with her.
He glanced back. Her eyes were focused on something down the street, and he knew in his mind—and hers—that she was looking at something with concern. “Don’t turn around right away, but we’ve got some company at the shuttle pad. That one Findiri that’s always with Haws—I mean Talus. Varus, I think his name is.”
Danny made a show of nodding, then turning back around and looking down at the sidewalk they were walking along before glancing backup. Yep. That’s him. Waiting for a shuttle? A Findiri? What gives?
I suppose we’ll just ask him. We are private security to the woman who’s technically kinda his boss.
You mean to the puppet dangling off the fingers of Talus?
Puppet or no, Cooper’s all we got. Look sharp, here we go.
Varus had seen them, and now that they were just a dozen meters away, he waved them over.
“You’re Varus? I apologize, I don’t know your rank. Or your position in relation to Talus. As you can imagine, it’s been a busy few days,” said Liu.
He seemed to ignore her, and faced Danny directly as if she hadn’t spoken. “In this iteration I am an adjutant.”
“Oh,” said Danny, taking note of the phrase in this iteration. “And what is a Findiri adjutant?”
“I serve by directing the actions of a single ship and its support ships, under the Director himself.”
“Got it. So there are, what, a hundred adjutants? A thousand?”
He was probing, knowing that they still had no idea of the true size of the Findiri fleet, as squadrons of ships had gone off to worlds such as New Dublin, Mao Prime, Mayorca, and dozens of others.
“One hundred and fifty-two. We lost eight adjutants in the battle for Earth, but they served well, and in the next iteration will be rewarded.”
Varus glanced at the other two Findiri at his side—knowingly, though Danny hadn’t the slightest idea of what they were possibly communicating.
“When is the next iteration? And—sorry to be so ignorant about this—but what is an iteration?”
“It is foolish to feel sorrow at lack of knowledge. It is better to ask, to fill the gap of knowledge, than to feign sorrow.”
Danny blinked. “That was . . . surprisingly wise,” he said, not adding, for a savage murderous race like yours, like he was thinking.
“A Findiri brother lives two hundred and ten of your solar years. His body then shuts down, and a new iteration of that brother is created in the corporeal fabrication chambers. His deeds are taken into account for the next iteration, and he will be assigned a new position accordingly.”
“Wow. So karma’s real, apparently.” Danny saw a shuttle approach from the sky. He glanced at his handheld and confirmed that this one wasn’t theirs. “You guys take private shuttles? Don’t the Findiri use their own ships?”
“Talus directed that we familiarize ourselves with human society. So we take human transportation to our destinations.”
“And that is?”
“None of your business, human.” Varus’s face was impassive. His red eyes looked straight ahead, and didn’t even acknowledge Danny by that point, just as he had not looked at Liu at all.
“I mean, just making sure we’re not going to the same place, otherwise we could just share a ride. Saves money, you know,” he added, trailing off. He doubted the shuttle pilot would be charging this group.
“Are you going to the East Coast Correctional Institute?” said Varus, still looking ahead at the landing pad.
“No.”
“Then we will not be sharing a ride.” He looked as if he were about to say more, but one of the Findiri next to him was pointing to his wrist, which apparently projected a heads-up display that only they could see.
“Adjutant, we’ve found the companion of the traitor.”
Varus nodded approvingly. “Good. Looks like we’ll be paying a visit to New Haven as well. Have our
elite squadron meet us there in thirty minutes.”
With that, they ducked into the shuttle which had just landed, and the door closed behind them.
“New Haven?” said Danny.
“Connecticut.”
“What the hell is in New Haven? Granger’s companion? Isn’t that what they call my Aunt? The Companion to the Hero?”
Liu nodded. “Yeah, but she’s nowhere near Earth. Hang on, I’ll just ask her.”
Danny waited a moment, then saw Liu’s face change in an instant. “Qwerty.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sol Sector
Earth
New Haven, Connecticut
It had only been three days, but it felt like an eternity. Commander Qwerty wondered if that was what Captain Granger would have felt after being away for a few billion years, when for the rest of them he’d only been gone thirty. Right? Yes.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, cowboy. Three days is nothin’. You waited a whole month for Ace to say yes, right? And now look at you! An almost-married Nuevo Laredan city-slicker!” He glanced around the dimly-lit storage room stacked with books and papers and old dissertations, the tiny room inside Yale’s library that had become his cell.
“Almost-married,” he repeated. “Assuming you get out of here alive, old bastard. And get out while still sane. If I’m not careful I’ll start talking to myself. Just get me a herd of cats after that and I’m all set.”
He glanced at his handheld comm pad and saw it was nearly nine pm. The library would close soon, the students finally trickling out. That school hadn’t been canceled in the chaos of Earth’s fall to the Findiri was a wonder to him, but Director Talus had ordered that all institutions carry on normally, as if nothing had happened.
That couldn’t last.
“Let’s just take a look-see . . .” He pushed back from the desk and rolled his chair over to the door and cracked it open. Sure enough, a few stragglers were still sitting around a table, discussing their research, or more likely, talking about the invasion like everyone else. Four students, possibly freshmen by the looks of them. Damn. If the library staff didn’t kick them out, they’d be there all night. One of the boys punched another in the shoulder and the group laughed.
“Dammit. Come on kids, playtime’s over,” he murmured to himself. “Ah, here we go.” He watched as the rare collections director approached the youth and shooed them away. Good. That man had been a lifesaver. Literally. While Talus had promised general amnesty to all IDF officers who pledged allegiance to the new regime, he doubted it applied to his handsome self. He wasn’t the brightest tool in the street-smarts shed, but he assumed the guy helping Granger take down the Findiri was probably high on the list of people to take care of, in the mafia sense.
“Commander Qwerty, it’s safe, you can come out now,” said the rare collections director.
Peck. Director Peck. Had a nice ring to it. Good flow. Di-REC-tor-PECK. Nice. “Goddammit, man, hold it together. You’re a walking disaster,” he said to himself, and opened the door. “DirRECtor PECK,” he began, accidentally vocalizing his previous thought and mentally swearing at himself. “Thanks again for your hospitality.”
“Need a shower?” said Peck.
“Naw. But I’ll ask for the same thing I asked for yesterday, and the day before that. And the day before that. Any change in your answer?”
“Yes, actually.” Peck motioned him over to another room. The door was locked, but the director positioned his face for the ocular scanner and the mechanism clicked. “I’ve been in touch with my colleagues on San Martin, and your story checks out.”
“Oh! So, you do have a backup electronic copy of the Voynich Manuscript?” For the past three days the director had played coy, neither confirming nor denying the existence of a copy, saying he needed to make sure Qwerty was who he said he was. Top-secret cloak and dagger shit going on at Yale library, apparently.
“No, but I’ll do you one better. Follow me, please,” he said, and entered the room. On the wall was a safe with an old fashioned spin-dial lock, and he twisted the knob back and forth until it too clicked open. “My colleagues on San Martin have told me that you are indeed working with the Bricklayer.”
“And who are these colleagues of yours?” said Qwerty, watching the safe door open with growing anticipation.
“Vestige. Don’t worry, you haven’t heard of us. Let’s just say . . . the Bricklayer laid a foundation for many things in the past, our organization included.” He reached inside the safe and pulled out a sealed briefcase, also locked. This one with a key, which Peck produced from a pocket. This last lock opened too, revealing the contents.
“Holy mother of sweet and sour baby Jaysus. Is that— That’s it? I thought it was stolen hundreds of years ago.” He reached out to touch the ancient leather cover of the Voynich Manuscript.
“Well, in a sense, it was. By us. There were a few actual theft attempts by people looking to make a buck, so we stole it to preempt any successful attempts. Except we didn’t take it anywhere. It’s been here the whole time. Our predecessors back in the twenty-first century thought it best to let the public believe it had been stolen, that way no one was tempted to actually steal it. And then we conveniently deleted all electronic copies. This here is the only version left—the original.”
Qwerty gingerly opened the manuscript, paging through the delicate vellum sheets. It was nearly identical to the manuscript they’d found in the alien grave on the robot sentry world. Except for the words, those appeared different. But the images were all the same. Though no drawing of Granger on the last page. “But why? I mean, given the events of the past few days I kinda see how that’s a dumb question. But still—why?”
Peck shrugged. “Much has been written and theorized by our members over the years, and the conclusion is we still don’t know exactly. But something within these pages will be key to defeating the enemies of humanity in the days and years to come. Something that the Bricklayer recorded, in some sort of code, obviously, that would be indecipherable to anyone but him when he returned. Some type of knowledge he clearly feared would fall into the wrong hands while he was gone, and something he didn’t want recorded in any other manner or location—even in his own brain, apparently. My colleagues on San Martin told me he can’t remember any details of what could be in this thing. The memory core that Jasper gave him may help, but neither we nor he know how to access the contents with our current technology. Anyway, that’s enough of an info dump for you. Why don’t you take a look? They say you’re the best, when it comes to code.”
“They do say that, yes,” murmured Qwerty as he examined the text. Complete gibberish, except with this version he could understand most of the letters. “I may have met my match, given that people tried for hundreds of years to decipher this.” He pulled out his handheld pad and dialed up the scanner, setting it for meta-space sensitivity.
Peck frowned. “Meta-space? What do you expect to find? It hasn’t left this library in over five hundred years.”
“Can’t say until I try it,” Qwerty said, saying what to him felt obvious. He waved the handheld over the manuscript, then all around it, passing it back and forth to triangulate any potential waveform shapes and polarizations. “Yep, there it is.”
“There what is?”
“The exact same meta-space signature I found in the . . .” He trailed off, not sure how much he should tell the man. He claimed to be from this shadowy organization that he says Granger founded, but he could also be playing him.
“In the alien version?”
Qwerty glanced over at him in surprise. “Oh! So you’ve talked to the old man himself then?”
Peck shook his head. “No, but as I said, my colleagues have. What do you think it means?”
“The meta-space signature? No idea. It’s like an extremely intense meta-space wave or pulse imprinted itself on the molecular structure of the pages. And the pattern and polarization is exactly the same. What does it mean?
Hard to say. And I’m no physicist.” As he said the word, he had a thought. “However, I do know a fairly brilliant one. He might have some thoughts.”
“Where?”
“A colleague on the ISS Volz, what would be my current post if I hadn’t been drafted into ancient manuscript translation duty.” He set the handheld down and flipped through a few more pages. “I assume this stays here?”
Peck shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Well . . . Vestige policy is that this never leave the premises.”
Qwerty’s handheld beeped, the tone that indicated an incoming urgent message. He picked it up, read it, and then held it out to Peck. “What about now?”
Peck squinted at the text, then put his reading glasses on to read it. “Who’s Danny?”
“Danny Proctor. He and his wife are President Cooper’s private security and pilots. And Admiral Proctor’s nephew.”
“And I assume by they’re coming, he’s referring to the Findiri?”
“Unfortunately.”
Peck’s face turned ashen white. “And I suppose that means neither of us are particularly safe at the moment?”
“Fair assumption.” Qwerty placed the manuscript back in the briefcase and closed it, then unholstered his sidearm. “I sincerely hope you’ve got some secret tunnels out of this place, otherwise things are going to get very shooty very quickly.”
CHAPTER NINE
Sol System
Earth, Low Orbit
Vestige Corvette Legend
“Ten coins says I can finish that beer before you can.”
He heard the voice behind him, heard the words, but couldn’t parse them together in his mind. He turned, and saw her there, for the first time.
Dazzling. That was the best word that came to mind.
“What?”
“You heard me,” she said. Then, to the bartender, “Two more of those, on my tab, please. Put a little extra in mine. And hurry, Ed, this is gonna be a race you won’t forget.” She thumped the bar twice next to his mostly-finished beer.