Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1)

by Dave Schroeder

  “Try looking for announcements of the Isolationists’ public meetings.”

  “The most frequently mentioned Earth First Isolationist meeting site on social media is the Waffle House at Peachtree Street and Paces Ferry Road.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “No,” said my phone.

  “Just how large is this group?”

  “Their Georgia SpaceBook page shows 23 Likes,” said my phone.

  Fewer than two dozen members? Their headquarters a private home? How does a group like that hire Cornell, Penn and Princeton? Why would they steal four bolts of expensive light bending morphabric? What reason could they have to kidnap an innocent Orishen intern and risk sentients’ lives when his pupa opened? It didn’t make sense. Their protest signs at the Capitol looked professional and their Galnet site was polished. Maybe there was big money behind them.

  “Who is the top dog for the Earth First Isolationists in Georgia?” I said.

  “My initial review indicates that at least two of the individuals liking their SpaceBook page may be canines,” said my phone. “Though I am uncertain whether or not there are more, because…”

  “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” This was as bad as having to figure out a foolproof way of wording three wishes. “Who is listed as the president of the organization with the Secretary of State’s office?”

  “Of Georgia?” said my phone.

  “Of course, of Georgia.”

  “Oscar Mosley.”

  “What’s his net worth?”

  “I am unable to determine,” said my phone. “No personal financial details are available.”

  Drat, I’d have to research that on my own. My to do list was getting long. Though I guess extensive privacy safeguards were to be expected from an Isolationist.

  “Where does he live?”

  “1776 Longstreet Drive, Atlanta, Georgia.”

  I sighed.

  “Take me there.”

  “Thank you for using your seat belt,” said my van.

  * * * * *

  I closed my eyes for the short trip, hoping I could grab a few minutes of sleep and give my subconscious time to evaluate and integrate data. Unfortunately, my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It kept telling me there was a lot more to this than I realized. Maybe it had been doing some evaluating and integrating while I’d slept last night. No matter how fast the little hamster on the wheel inside my head ran, however, I couldn’t get the message to move from my subconscious to my conscious mind. Then another thought grabbed my brain stem and tugged.

  Why was I trying to do this on my own instead of informing the relevant authorities, like the Atlanta Police Department or the state cops or even the FBI for that matter? The incident with Shuvvath’s pupa being left at the Zesto’s could have been a GaFTA-level problem, after all, but I let the Orishen consulate handle it quietly. I kept my mouth shut about the trio of thugs in the Capitol basement instead of sharing all the details with Lieutenant Lee. Now I was planning to confront the local president of the Earth First Isolationists in his home. Who did I think I was?

  I took a deep breath, leaned my head back against the headrest and thought. The hamster stopped running at high speed and found a slow, steady rhythm. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t going to the police—or the press—because if I did it would just make things worse and cause the sort of bad publicity the Isolationists were seeking. In this situation the police and the FBI were in the same boat they’d been in back in the early days of the personal computer revolution. The first hackers had them running in circles. Law enforcement just didn’t have the right skills or knowledge to be effective. I had reached out to one sort of authority. Tomáso was the local head of the Dauushan DEA. I’d run my suspicions past him when I had more data to go on. That data included a face-to-face with Oscar Mosley. I hoped he was home.

  My van turned off a major Buckhead thoroughfare and onto a series of residential streets lined with elegant blossoming dogwoods and oaks and maples bearing new spring leaves. It parked in front of a modest century-old 1930s era white frame bungalow and announced “1776 Longstreet Drive.” I thanked the A.I. and got out. The front lawn was well maintained and the sidewalk leading up to the broad front porch was lined with bright yellow daffodils. A mailbox painted with sun-bleached pictures of songbirds sat on a wooden post next to the street. The landscaping appeared to get more attention than the house itself. I could see that the paint on its siding and trim was cracking as I headed up the walk. The asphalt-shingled roof looked like it was five years overdue for replacement. A tired garage sat behind the house and was just visible on the right. The whole property felt faded and shabby. If we’d been a few degrees of latitude further south or closer to the coast I would have expected the porch to be draped with Spanish moss. I knocked on the front door.

  “Go away,” said an old man’s voice from inside the house.

  “No one gets in to see the wizard?” I said. I wanted him off-balance.

  “What?” said the voice.

  “Not no one, not no how!” I said, completing the quote.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know why your goons attacked me.”

  “Goons?”

  “Thugs, ruffians, whatever,” I said. “May I come in, please? Better me than the police.”

  I heard two chains being unhooked and a deadbolt being turned before the door opened. A small, thin man in his seventies with disproportionately broad shoulders stood in the doorway. He had close cropped white hair and 1980s era bifocal glasses. As he blinked in the morning sunlight he looked left and right like a mouse trapped between two cats. I stepped inside. He backed away behind the door then shut and secured it. We were in his living room. The furniture was out of date by half a century. The drapes were thick. The light was dim. It was clear that no one had dusted in months. There was an odd, sharp smell in the house, like some sort of solvent.

  “What do you want?” he repeated.

  “May I sit down? This may take a while.”

  “If you must,” said the man. He pointed at an overstuffed sofa and I sat on the edge so I wouldn’t sink into it. He took what was obviously his chair, a cracked brown leather wingback by a low table.

  “Oscar Mosley?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Mr. Mosley,” I said, “my name is Jack Buckston. In the last twenty-four hours Earth First Isolationists have physically attacked me, kidnapped a student from one of the most prominent planets in the Galactic Free Trade Association and risked the lives of dozens of men, women and children.” And a Pyr who liked Zesto’s frozen custard cones, I thought but didn’t mention. Isolationists weren’t fond of other sentient species.

  “What?” he said. The little man looked like he had no idea what I was talking about. That surprised me. At the very least I would have expected Lieutenant Lee to have followed up on the claims Cornell, Penn and Princeton were making about serving the Earth First Isolationists’ cause and talked to Mosley.

  “Lieutenant Lee hasn’t spoken with you?”

  “Who?” said Mosley, sounding like a befuddled owl. He blinked at me several times behind his bifocals. This was going nowhere. I pulled out the card I found at Morphicouture and showed it to Mosley.

  “I found this at the spot where an Orishen intern had been drugged and kidnapped,” I said. I pointed to the red circle-slash over a black spiral galaxy printed on the card. “It’s the Isolationists’ logo.”

  He surprised me by standing up and taking two quick steps to cross the space between us. Then he pulled the card from my fingers and returned to his chair. It was the most energy I’d seen him exert so far. He turned on a reading lamp on the low table beside him. Once his eyes adjusted to the light he tilted his head back and looked closely at the card through the bottom half of his glasses.

  “This isn’t my work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your name is Jack?” The man was no mastermind.<
br />
  “Yes.”

  “Alright, Jack,” he said, “follow me.” He rose and hobbled off.

  I followed him from the living room to an equally dim dining room with a large walnut table topped with a yellowed lace tablecloth. From there he turned left into a kitchen that looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since the house had been built. I didn’t know they even made linoleum counter tops. He opened a door in the kitchen and started walking down a set of dark narrow stairs to what I assumed was the basement. I stayed close behind him which wasn’t hard because he seemed to wince every time he had to bend his knees. His right hand gripped the railing like it was the only thing holding him up. The Nicósn anti-arthritis drugs had ended those kinds of aches and pains—but not for Isolationists. The solvent smell was getting stronger.

  When the old man got to the bottom of the stairs he turned a corner and was momentarily out of sight. I heard the clack of an old fashioned light switch being flipped and when I turned the corner my surroundings had gone from dim to bright. At the same time a heavy-duty fan started pulsing somewhere out of sight and I could feel air moving. I was in a large underground room as long as the house. Two rows of ancient industrial florescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling provided plenty of illumination. A huge wood and iron printing press like something out of Gutenberg’s workshop dominated the far end of the room.

  The rest was filled with a broad wooden table, boxes of lead type, tubes of ink, drying racks, and over-sized stacks of paper and white cardboard. Dark-stained rags were piled in a corner. A bale of flat, six-foot wooden sticks, the kind used for protest signs, leaned against the side of the stairs we’d just descended. An old soapstone sink was on the near wall. The solvent smell was obviously from the ink and whatever he used to remove it. It filled the air despite the best efforts of the thrumming fan I now spotted high on the back wall.

  “You’re a printer?” I said. Master of the obvious, Jack.

  “That’s right,” said Mosley, “Using the original 15th century screw press technology before all this new-fangled nonsense came along. Wooden presses and lead type are enough for me, young man. Not every change is a change for the better. My great-grandfather assembled this press in 1929, just before the crash, and built the house around it. He ran a small publishing house and hand-set academic monographs and small print runs of books of poetry. It kept food on the table.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, “but what about the card?” I really was fascinated. I could spend a week down here learning about the original high tech machine of the modern age.

  “Let me show you.” Mosley reached onto a shelf under the table and pulled out a flat wooden tray larger than a cookie sheet. On it were two carved wooden figures—interlocking spiral arms of a simplified galaxy nearly two feet across. “This is a form,” he said. He carried the tray with the woodcut over to the press and fit it securely into a flat box that slid back and forth. “This is the bed. Help me with the inking.”

  Mosley reached under the table again and pulled up what looked like a pair of giant wooden chess pawns with a bulging circle of ink-stained leather tacked around their bottoms. “I stuff them with raw wool,” he said. I took one of the pawns and pushed against the leather. It indented from my touch then rebounded. “I soak them in urine to keep them pliable,” he said.

  I was suddenly glad my nose was overwhelmed by the smell of ink. Having a sink nearby where I could wash my hands later was also a major plus. He handed me the other pawn and told me to hold them, bottoms up. Then he squirted a quarter-sized dollop of ink from a tube on one of them. “I make it myself,” he said. “Linseed oil and lampblack.” It looked every bit as messy as a leaking laser printer cartridge and would probably be a real pain to get out of my clothes if I wasn’t careful. I was starting to like the smell.

  “These are printer’s balls,” he said. “Rub their leather bottoms together to distribute the ink.” I did as instructed, wondering if I would have been more shocked to find that Mosley had stocked his basement with torture devices instead of printing equipment. Once I had a thin coat of ink on the printer’s balls he showed me how to transfer the ink to the carved wooden galaxy in the form. “Move your hand from side to side,” he said. “Rock the ink on, don’t try to stamp it down. That puts ink where you don’t want it.” I complied, tilting my wrists.

  Then he found a large piece of poster board and tucked it into clips on a frame hinged to the bed. He folded it on top of the inked form. “Help me crank it in,” he said. I turned a crank that slid the form and poster board under a metal plate connected to a giant screw with a long lever attached. While I watched he grabbed the lever and pulled on it smoothly, applying even pressure from the plate to the poster board and the inked form. Seeing him work made it clear why his shoulders were so well developed.

  “Now crank it back,” said Mosley. I did so, looking at the man with more respect. He was an odd duck, but he knew his art.

  Once the form was no longer underneath the metal plate Mosley unfolded the hinged section with the poster board and pulled off a perfect copy of the black galaxy part of the Earth First Isolationists’ logo. “We have to wait for this to dry before we can overprint in red,” he said. “I use cochineal insects to get a nice bright color.” I was glad I’d only had to work with linseed oil and lampblack.

  “Here’s a finished sign,” he said. He found what he was looking for leaning against the wall behind the press and carried it to the table. It was a protest sign version of the Isolationists’ logo about two feet in diameter printed on poster board, similar to the one we’d made. He put the card I’d brought him on top of the protest sign and rummaged around under the table again, surfacing with a Sherlock Holmes-style magnifying glass. “Take a look,” he said, “and tell me what you see.”

  The light was good so it wasn’t any trouble to get a detailed view of both sign and card. The ink on the sign was smooth and continuous, like it had been painted. The ink on the card was applied in thousands of tiny dots—it must be from a high end color laser printer. Mosley worked in an analogue medium. The only thing digital about him, it seemed, was his fingers. I believed that he hadn’t made the card.

  “Could someone else in your organization have made this card?”

  “Anybody can make anything these days,” said Mosley, “but I doubt it. We’re all retired and can barely use our phones.”

  That made sense once I remembered that the Earth First Isolationist protesters I’d seen at the state capitol building yesterday were all senior citizens. The stenciled version of the Isolationists’ logo spray-painted on the pavement by the dumpsters at Zesto’s didn’t sound like their sort of thing either. I had more questions than answers.

  “Why are you protesting in front of the state capitol every afternoon?” I asked.

  “Nixon should have never gone to China,” said Mosley, “and Wilson should have kept us out of that damned fool European war.”

  Crazy is as crazy does. Isolationists didn’t have to make sense.

  “That’s it?” I said. “You just want to turn back the clock to before First Contact?”

  “Exactly,” said Mosley. “Look at how well first contact with Europeans worked out for the Native Americans.”

  I nodded. That was the first and most often used argument in the Isolationists’ playbook.

  “So you decided to fight back?” I said, thinking about the Ivy League goons and Shuvvath’s pupa.

  “No, young man,” said Mosley, “at this stage of my life I just want to live in less complicated times. The most fighting my friends and I do is arguing over the check for breakfast at Waffle House when we get together to mourn the loss of simpler days. I remember when you could get a rush from the exhaust of a well-tuned car engine. My friend Bill—he’s a retired mechanic—can’t stand these modern cars that toot rather than growl. There’s no smoke at all coming out of their exhaust systems. Modern printing is the same way—it’s all pushing buttons. There’s no human
sweat in it.”

  “So you didn’t hire thugs or kidnap bugs?” The Orishen considered that descriptor a compliment rather than a slur given “God’s inordinate fondness for beetles” so I didn’t feel that it was inappropriate to use the term.

  “Of course not, young man,” said Mosley. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “But you’re Earth First Isolationists. You folks have a reputation for anti-Galactic activism.”

  “Here in Atlanta we’re more of a social club than a political organization,” Mosley said. “We don’t let any foolishness from headquarters in Fort Collins get in the way of our daily activity.”

  “Daily activity?”

  “Walking around with signs at the Capitol building.”

  “That’s all you do?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mosley. “Too many of us need naps afterward to do anything strenuous.”

  I nodded.

  “And besides,” he said, “I like the money.”

  “What money?” This was news.

  “The payments we get for marching,” he said. “And it’s good exercise.”

  Forget the exercise.

  “Tell me about the money.”

  “We each get $50 a day for marching from noon to 3:00 in the afternoon on Monday through Friday in from of the state capitol,” said Mosley. “I get $100 a day but I print the signs and drive the van.”

  “The van?”

  “It’s a 15-person passenger van,” Mosley said. “He got it for us.”

  “He?”

  I was glad there wasn’t a mirror around since I was sure I looked like a cartoon character who’d been hit in the face with a 2-by-4.

  “The man who pays us,” said Mosley. I took a deep breath.

  “And who’s that?”

  “I met him about a year ago,” said Mosley. “He overheard me talking with my friends at Waffle House about how the planet’s gone to hell since the Galactics arrived.”

  I took another deep breath. He’d get to it. I just had to be patient.