by M. R. Forbes
"They didn't change anything else, did they?"
"Let me see." His eye fluttered as he read the data projected onto it. "Minor system updates, three percent improvement in CAP-NN routing. Compatibility with the Carrion, whatever that is."
Mitchell knew what it was. A new mech, still in testing phase. If they were adding the compatibility routines to drive it, that meant it was on the verge of being approved for purchase. That wasn't exactly good news. Greylock had been sent a Carrion to test out. It was a small, thirty ton mech, nimble as anything, but also a brittle piece of shit. They'd brought it down to a training ground on Cestus and disabled it inside of five minutes with standard infantry fire.
It was being approved because the cost was as low as its usefulness. Having a hundred of them wandering a theater as peacekeepers would work out just fine, as long as nobody actually attacked it.
"So, nothing that would cause me to be seeing things? Or hearing things?" Mitchell put his hand up to his temple again.
"Nothing obvious. Personally, I think it's just stress. You've been getting run ragged the last couple of months. I submitted a request to have you moved to inactive for a few weeks for some R & R, but it was denied. It seems Command doesn't think there's anything difficult with being a celebrity. They aren't accounting for the fact that you watched your entire squad get blown away."
Mitchell winced. It wasn't the most sensitive statement, but his heart was in the right place. "Thanks for trying, doc."
"I'm just doing my job. So you know, Major Arapo requested copies of all the records, as well a full write-up. If you hear or see anything else, just try to ignore it, and definitely don't try to convince her. The more I have to talk to her, the more apropos your praying mantis analogy seems."
Mitchell laughed. "Is that your professional opinion?"
Dr. Drummond got to his feet. "I'm seventy-four years old, seventy-eight in Earth time. It's my experienced opinion."
"I don't suppose you can tell me anything else about her?"
"Like her birthday?"
"Like who she's reporting to? What branch she's out of? I have my hunches, but..."
"They don't tell me much. What I can tell you is that I was surprised to find out someone like her was already stationed on Liberty. I'm pretty confident you're the reason for that."
It wasn't anything Mitchell didn't already know, but it was nice to have confirmation. "Thanks again, doc. I hope I don't see you again too soon."
"Me, too, Captain. Me, too."
Major Arapo was waiting for him outside, her flat expression betraying her tense posture.
"I know," Mitchell said, cutting her off before she could speak. "Nothing on the scan. No abnormalities anywhere. Dr. Drummond seems to think I'm stressed."
"We're all stressed. It's part of what we do."
"I don't suppose I could get a week off sometime?"
"I'll bring it up with Command. Right now, we have to get you ready for the gala tonight."
"Get me ready?"
"There's a new dress uniform waiting in your room. You need to try it on. We used the measurements from your scan this morning, but when you're going to be meeting with General Cornelius and the Prime Minister of Delta, you take extra precaution."
Mitchell stopped walking. "Wait. Did you say the Prime Minister?"
"Yes."
"Of the entire quadrant?"
"Yes. Why do you think there was such a rush to put this thing together? It's going to be great for publicity to have you up there getting awarded by the Prime Minister."
"And I'm not supposed to be stressed?"
She stopped a dozen feet ahead of him and spun around. "I thought you were a Space Marine?"
"I'd rather drop into the middle of a nuke field than make small talk with the Prime Minister."
"There's nothing to be afraid of, Captain. He pisses the same as you do."
"Just into a nicer bowl?"
"Yes. Come on."
Mitchell caught up to her, and they continued walking.
"So, after I try on the uniform, then what?"
"Don't you ever check your ARR? We canceled everything else today ahead of time, in case your scan came back problematic. Command didn't want to take chances on this one. You have a whole seven hours to yourself." She smiled sideways at him. "Of course, you're locked down to your room until then."
"I figured as much. Are you going to be standing guard outside my door?"
"I have better things to do than babysit you all the time."
"Like what?"
They reached the officer's barracks. Mitchell followed her to his room near the center of the long, flat building. There were two MPs already waiting outside, ready to ensure he stayed put. They were both larger than him, with square jaws and thick muscles. They came to attention when they approached. Maybe she wouldn't be standing guard. Someone would.
"This is for your protection, Mitch," she said, ignoring his question. "Since you're not sure about your own stability. It's only until after the gala."
"Not taking chances. I get it. Howdy, boys."
"Captain Williams," one of them said in greeting.
His hatch opened and he stepped into the room. "I'll see you later then, Major," he said, turning around. She was already on her way back out.
Mitchell closed the hatch and went into the bedroom. The uniform was laid out on it, and he ran his hand over the decorations pinned to the chest, and the space that had been left for the new one. He considered trying the uniform on right away, and then decided against it. It had taken almost a full day for him to get a minute alone.
He retreated to the living room, dropping down onto the gel sofa and leaning his head back on one of the arms. A thought brought up the p-rat interface, and a second started a query for "Goliath." The voices in his medically cleared head kept telling him to find it. He figured it couldn't hurt to learn what it actually was.
The first result was called The History of XENO-1. Aldus had mentioned the name, and he had a feeling that somehow it had been what set him off. He scrolled the table of contents, skimming through the menu, with titles like The Arrival, The Discovery, First to Antarctica, The Beginning of the Xeno War, The Xeno War: Year 2, The Xeno War: Year 3, The Xeno War: Year 4, A Time of Peace, and The Goliath.
He stopped when he saw it, moving into that section with a thought. It was mixed media: video, imagery, and text all floating in the center of his left eye with enough transparency that he could see the ceiling behind it. He closed his eyes and spread the p-rat display across both of his retinas, finding himself immersed in a three-dimensional space, surrounded by floating boxes containing the content, all neatly organized. He held his hands out and reached for a section labeled "Construction."
The rest of the contents shrank away, while the photos in the Construction section flew out and expanded into a giant wall of imagery. He pulled the first image, and it shrunk down into a stack he could flick through.
The first picture was nothing but a shell, a frame of what appeared to be an earlier form of poly-alloy - a nano-scale material based on carbon, graphite, and iron. It was an extremely durable and light metal that along with carbonates, aerogels, and ultralight cement was used in just about everything these days. The caption beneath the photo read "A skeleton ship. First successful application of new alloy."
A starship? He checked the date on the image. September, 2043. Over four hundred years ago. He turned off the display for a moment, leaving himself in darkness.
Goliath. He tried to remember his history lessons. He had never been a particularly attentive student, preferring to watch the girls in his class rather than attune himself to the droning of his professor. Now he wished he had at least listened a little bit. He smiled, wondering if that was the day Keely Masterson had worn that skin suit with the dynamic patterns that flowed across it, the one that had been banned a couple of months later due to a glitch that would cause parts of it to randomly turn transparent. He didn't
know if anyone else had seen it when the chest had gone clear. If his professor had, he didn't say anything. A sly pervert. Who could blame him for not paying attention that day?
He turned the display back on and flicked the graphic away. The next image was a few months later. More of the frame was completed, revealing the massive size of the ship. It wasn't quite as large as the Frontier Federation's dreadnought, but it was bigger than anything in the Alliance's stable. Two kilometers long, and half as wide. It was bulky for a starship. Not that aerodynamics mattered in the vacuum of space, but it would be an awfully big target, and impossible to lay shield coverage over. Mitchell wasn't sure they even had shields back then.
Four hundred years. He put his hand up to his head again, feeling the smooth skin where he had been shot. Dr. Drummond told him he was fine, and the scans backed him up. He didn't feel fine. Why was he seeing things, and hearing things? What did they all have to do with this antique starship? If it were still around, he was sure he would have heard about it.
"The bullet messed me up a little, that's all," he said out loud. "It shorted the implant, and somewhere in my subconscious I pulled back the memory of my history class. Probably focused on a strong emotional response. Probably because of Keely."
He flicked out of the image gallery. "Doc's right. Just leave it alone. Keep up the good work as a performing monkey, and maybe you'll get a few days rest somewhere down the line."
He felt stupid for even making the effort to do the search. He backed out to the results and decided to scan them, just to see what else he could find. There was no harm in scanning a list.
He scrolled through thousands of results. He found some references to an old Earth comic book that predated XENO-1, but everything else pointed right at the starship. It made him feel better to see it, as though it proved his hypothesis. It also meant it was time to drop the whole idea. The more he obsessed over it, the more obsessed he would become. He wasn't about to take something that could have been harmless and turn it into psychosis.
Mitchell opened his eyes and cleared the display from his right eye. He looked over at the time in his left eye. He still had five hours until the gala. He wanted a drink. That wasn't going to happen. He wanted to head over to Training and hop into a simulator. He doubted the MPs would be too agreeable to that idea either. He sighed and returned to the bedroom. He stripped down and tried on the uniform. Of course, the fit was perfect, and he had to admit he looked damn good in dress blues.
He took it all off, careful to keep it in perfect condition. He couldn't afford to be wrinkled in front of Cornelius or the Prime Minister. Then he laid down on top of the bed and closed his eyes.
Despite all of his years of training and experience, he had never gotten quite used to the idea of being out of control during a jump. There was a tight lightness in the stomach that came from plummeting to the ground in the cramped confines of thirty to eighty tons of metal, carrying thousands of pounds of ordinance and relying on boosters, aerofoils, and finally foot thrusters to make the landing an arguable degree of gentle. It was an uncomfortable feeling, one that he had never seemed to be able to master.
Ella had taught him how she managed to stay so calm. It was the only thing that had ever helped.
"It's all in the breath," she said. "Slow, deep, steady, focused. Mind over matter."
"Slow. Steady," he said to himself, taking control of his breath.
He wasn't joking when he told Christine he would rather drop into a nuke field. It would have been bad enough to meet the Prime Minister straight up. He was going to be getting an award from the man. An award predicated on a damn lie.
"Slow. Steady."
10
EARTH. February 9, 2036
Kathy was glued to the television. Her entire family was. Maybe even the entire world.
Almost nine months had passed since it had fallen from space, the gigantic craft that someone had labeled "XENO-1." It had crossed over the northern hemisphere, sending shockwaves for hundreds of miles around it, rattling windows and houses and people on its cruel descent before finally touching down in the Antarctic. It slammed into the surface of the ice with enough force to leave a trail of debris nearly a hundred miles long, and wiped out the permanent field station of more than one nation along the way.
Chaos had followed in the immediate aftermath. Tsunami warnings were issued, the disruption to the southernmost continent creating a slew of environmental concerns. An EMP leak from the crashing ship knocked out power for hundreds of thousands for over a week and a half. People died, the causes too numerous to keep track of. Drowned in the floods, hit by distracted drivers, heart attacks from surprise and shock, heatstroke from losing their AC.
They tried to lie about it at first. They said it was an asteroid. They thought they could get away with it. They were old men trying to tell old tales. Cameras were too good, too sharp. Pictures and videos flooded the internet, detailed shots that clearly showed a structure that was organized and made of some kind of metal. More pictures showed it was charred and scarred, broken and burned, though how it got that way - if it happened on entry into the atmosphere or had been battered on its journey - was anybody's guess.
An embarrassed government updated the lie. People were fired. Life went on. Antarctica was nobody's property, and it now contained something that everyone wanted.
The United States was the first to arrive on the scene, only a day ahead of Japan, Russia, China, Iran, and the rest. They each wanted to claim the wreck as their own. They all wanted the secrets everyone on the planet knew that it held. The secret to traveling in space. The mysteries of how to build something so immense and send it to the stars. A demilitarized zone was formed around it, guns pointing in every direction, the actual crash site off-limits. To enter it was to die, and more than a few tried. Their bodies remained to be buried under fresh snow and ice. The bulk of the ship suffered the same fate.
The news coverage had been running non-stop in Kathy's house since the day the ship came down. She was enamored with the mystery of its origins, and the potential that it held to carry her beyond the blue sky. She stayed up late watching interviews with soldiers who served at the site, with politicians who were part of the arguing over how to best claim it, or share it, or figure out some way to actually do something with the opportunity other than watch it get buried under the cold. She listened to the pundits, the celebrities. She went online and searched the back channels for conspiracies and clues. She even convinced her parents to buy her a t-shirt that read "I saw the crash" and had a blurry satellite photo of the site pressed onto it.
Today was different, though. Today was the day she had been waiting for. A decision from the President, from Congress, from the most powerful nation in the world on how they would solve the quagmire and move civilization forward and into a new age.
Her parents were on the couch beside her. Her father, tall and strong, an electrical engineer. Her mother, a chemistry professor at the nearby community college. They had instilled in their daughter the love of science, the desire to learn. Her younger brother was somewhere in the house, probably his room, disinterested in politics and tired of hearing about XENO-1.
Kathy checked the time. 8:59. She kept her eyes glued to it until it switched over to 9:00. The commercials on the television paused midstream, and the United States seal appeared in their stead. A moment later, that too vanished, replaced with a camera view of a podium.
Their house was silent. The room at the White House was also quiet. Kathy could almost feel the tension through the thin layer of diodes. There had been an incident two days earlier. A bomb had gone off in the camp of the Alliance of Nations and killed almost a hundred soldiers.
The President was an older woman, with gray hair and a taut face wearing a conservative blue suit. Her posture was confident and composed as she gained the podium.
"My fellow Americans," she said, her voice solid and strong. "These past months have done nothing, if not prove
n that there is life beyond this Earth, intelligent life that is not so unlike our own. Life that sought to learn, to grow, to reach for the stars and attain them. Life that ended tragically in the snow and ice of the Arctic." She paused, drawing in a deep breath. "We have made every attempt to honor the lives of these travelers who we do not know, and have not met. At the same time, we have worked tirelessly to honor the lives of our fellow humans here on Earth by coming to a peaceful and reasonable resolution to the question of ownership of the stricken craft. It has become abundantly clear in these months that there are those outside of the Alliance of Nations who are unwilling to settle for anything less than complete control of the site, to the extent that two days past they carried out a cowardly terrorist attack to disrupt our peacekeeping operations outside of the demilitarized zone. Intelligence sources have identified the source of this attack as that of the so-called Federation of Allies. While we have made every effort to negotiate with the Federation in good faith over the past four months, it has become clear to me that the leadership of the Federation does not share this non-violent view."
She stopped then, holding the pause for at least ten seconds. She glanced to her left, offstage to where her husband waited and offered encouragement. Kathy leaned forward on the couch, her heart skipping, her fear and excitement building.
"It is with the utmost sadness that I am to announce that the Alliance of United Nations has voted in favor of abandoning our talks with the Federation and reinforcing our claim to the crashed starship, using whatever resources and force is required.
My fellow Americans, I regret to inform you that tonight, we are at war."
11
"Do you always sleep naked, Captain?" Major Arapo asked.
Mitchell opened his eyes. The Major was standing next to the bed, unimpressed.
"Do you always walk into people's quarters without knocking?" He tapped his head, and then blinked a few times. Christine was wearing a little black dress that accented all the best parts of her.