by David Ryker
The anger broke through the dam of patience.
“Fletcher! Listen, damn you!” Loreto slapped the desk. “We’re going to die here and I need you to warn the colonies. Tell Olmec. Send protection, Fletcher.”
The display scrambled.
“What’s that, old boy?” The static-drenched screen froze. “–another joke?”
The ship jolted, and everything fell from the shelf. The screen cut out and the low emergency lighting seeped in. Loreto shook his head. That meant the shields were dangerously low. They’d cut the comms. They’d cut everything.
He ran back to the bridge as fast as his tired legs could carry him. His thoughts thundered like a storm, remembering the people counting on him and the oath he’d sworn.
“Status report.” He gasped the routine words, a small comfort as he returned to the bridge.
“We lost power.” Hertz walked alongside him toward the holo-plate. “Stray blast. We’re back online soon, I hope.”
“A failure?”
Failure was a dirty word aboard the Vela. The crew knew it; Loreto drilled the phrase into their heads from the very first day.
“We’re trying to find out now.”
Even as Hertz spoke, the normal lighting flooded back. It didn’t illuminate much but the holo-plate stirred. The battle appeared again.
“It seems the same to me.”
“No, Hertz. Look.” Loreto jumped onto the dais. The entire diagram had been drawn bigger. “They’re closer.”
Loreto had lost count of the systems in the Federation, but there were thousands of planets, many of them with colonies, each with untold millions, even billions of people. Moving within a system took time. A few hours, depending on the ship. The trace gates connected the systems; perpetually clear, Federation-approved pathways which helped vessels travel unencumbered . If these invaders reached the gates, they’d spread through Federation space in no time, humanity at their mercy. That’s why I’m here, Loreto told himself.
“Hertz, get me the numbers on the ships out there.”
Hertz peered into the projection.
“The Sirens weren’t set up for tracking at this speed, sir, but we can try.”
The captain disappeared into the darkness. Pipes leaked hissing steam and footsteps clattered along the metal deck. From the gloom, people called out numbers and stats. Energy levels: dropping. Shield frequency refresh rates: unsteady. Wisp readiness: improving.
“I don’t want fighters engaging,” Loreto ordered. “Have them circle the other ships. The Navis and the Carina, make sure they’re protected first.”
“Yessir!” the bridge chorused.
The projection moved constantly; the blue shapes redrew themselves hundreds of times every second. Battle lines, shaping the front. But they moved relentlessly, closer and closer to human space, travelling hundreds of kilometers in the time it took to adjust a collar. Loreto ached inside, massaging his temple nervously. There was no chance of getting a comms link again. Fletcher had been his only hope; everyone else was out of range. He studied the map.
The biggest ships, the scimitars, tied themselves up in a knot around the ringed structure. A space opened up around their inner core, a dead zone where they shot down anything that entered. Then, the rest of the battle thronged in a loose outer core where fighters flew in and out of the wreckage. The mess began to reveal itself to him.
“Look at these ones, Hertz. They’re better equipped. They’re defensive.” Loreto pointed up into the battle’s beating heart. “There’s two sides here, an attacker and a defender.”
“And what are we?”
The captain showed his horrible habit of scratching at the wrong wounds.
“Nothing, Hertz. Not yet.”
Loreto worriedly looked back toward the Vela.
“If they get past us,” he continued, his mind racing, “they’ve got free rein to unleash hell in the Federation.”
“You think they’re ready to attack us? You think they’re a threat?”
“They’ve hit our ship, Hertz. That’s war, right?”
“Aye, sir. By the book.”
Fletcher and the politicians, they loved the book. But things weren’t so straightforward near the Pale.
“We don’t go by the book, do we, Captain?”
“Not always, sir.”
“Not always.”
Loreto stalked around the holo-plate, time ticking away. One wrong move and he’d declare war on an invading army. One wrong move and he’d kill himself and everyone onboard. One wrong move and he’d expose humanity to whatever the hell had just invaded. One wrong move and his oath went up in smoke.
“What do we want, Hertz?” Loreto stooped down.
“Sir?”
“Anyone else in here.” He spoke louder. “What do we want?”
Loreto heard his own desperation, but there were things he needed to hear. These people’s lives were on the line, just like his. They deserved a voice.
“To… protect the Federation?” Menels stumbled.
“Almost, Menels. We’re here to protect humanity. Look, there’s two sides here, right?”
Mumbled agreement. Steam hissed and the engines rumbled, far away.
“And we’re on the defensive?”
Same again, as small debris chattered against the shields.
“Right. We’re going to weaponize our weakness. We’re inferior in numbers, in tech, in everything. But we’ve got our smarts.”
“I don’t follow.” Hertz moved next to his superior. “We attack?”
“We attack, Hertz.” He sensed the plan energizing him. “But carefully. We target here, here, and here.”
Loreto pointed at three clusters of fighters.
“Our fighters can’t match their speed, sir.”
“On our own, no. But we’re taking a side, Hertz.” The admiral tapped his gold wriststrap, opening a comms link. “Cavs, you’re ready?”
A gust of static blew in from below.
“Yessir.”
“Good. Guns forward, I’m sending the targets.”
“Targets?”
Loreto closed the link and the three ships he’d selected turned orange.
“Tell Jimmy to fire everything. We’ve got to make the big guys realize we’re on their side.”
People implemented the orders, buzzing around the bridge. The whole ship began to thrum as the cannons fired.
“Richard,” the captain whispered, “do you know what you’re doing?”
“I’m starting a war, Hertz.” The words felt wrong. “But only to stop one.”
“Do you have the authority to do that?”
Loreto paused. He didn’t dare admit it, but he was dangerously close to feeling alive. He’d sworn an oath and–finally–it meant something.
“I think we’re about to find out.”
The two targeted ships disintegrated and faded away. Hertz dabbed again at the sweat soaking through his beard.
“I hope we’re doing the right thing,” he mumbled in his broad, backwater accent.
The words hit Loreto hard. Guilt and shame and fear, coalescing into self-doubt. But he had no other option; they couldn’t afford to lose. The Vela trembled again, another volley of shots. Failure was a dirty word.
5
Hess
Deep in the buried hell of Providence, Acton Hess sneered. The girl sat opposite, her thin shoulders sagging under the weight of discussion.
“Why didn’t they have a choice?” she asked, her bright eyes burning with a fascinating intensity. “They can’t send people to the colonies… not unless they want to go?”
“They don’t have to force them, per se.” Hess gestured to the window, which failed to keep out the commotion of the protest. “They simply make it untenable for a certain class of person to stay. Et voilà.”
The French was a nice touch, he thought. The girl had come to him for an education; dead languages always impressed. Hess walked toward the window to watch the incre
asingly-agitated demonstration, passing through the office with its marble walls and high ceilings, a platinum chandelier hanging above their heads.
There were a thousand names for this city but no one word could convey everything about life in the deep dry well at the center of the Senate’s universe. Providence seemed soothingly ironic, at least.
Through the glass, he saw distant gray sunlight. The city sat in a hollowed-out crack hundreds of kilometers wide and as deep as a diamond mine. With every resource burned out of the Earth, the people made their home in the dirt. The Senate had filled their city with all the planet’s ancient wonders. He could see the distant dome of the Taj, the spire of the Empire State, Stonehenge’s slabs, the Dubai Pearl, the 105 Building, and the Chinese wall, which wrapped itself partly around the brim above them, interrupted only by the Tarbela Dam. The ruins of the Burj Khalifa lay flat halfway down the far slope, now home to hundreds of thousands of people, living in close proximity. The Senate hoarded wonders in their city like they hoarded authority, believing that possessing the greatest works of human history lent legitimacy to their rule. They positioned themselves as the curators of the people’s past and the guardians of its future.
His reflection in the window pleased him. An oval face with a slightly weak chin. Good cheek bones. Good hairline. Jaw could be stronger, but there was no real way to work on that. While the glass showed the paleness of his skin, it could never hope to capture his eyes. Fiercely green, they worked constantly, skittering around the room, piecing everything together. Hess liked what he saw.
But beneath the expensive clothes and the finely trimmed hair–the sideburns cut to within a millimeter of perfection–he knew it was all just a mask. It was a skin, a familiar, presentable skin, the scab growing over the open wound. A scar, stitched from tissue that bore no resemblance to his original self. He was happy to wear it–he had worked hard to perfect every cell–but he knew it did nothing to reflect reality.
“I think I understand,” Alison Yotam ventured. “But if they’re so powerful, how can we stop them?”
Hess smiled for the first time in months, intrigued by Alison’s attitude. She’d come to him at his lowest ebb. The daughter of one of his greatest patrons in an election he’d lost. He had failed, had been ground up and crushed into miserable dust. She had come anyway.
“That, my dear, is the question.”
Hess turned around and considered his visitor. The synthetic light did her dark skin no favors. Tied up and trapped on top of her head, her hair couldn’t hide the crown-shaped birthmark on her slender neck. A triple-tipped blood-colored coronet, placed beside the pip inserted into the neck of every colony kid. He scratched at his own collar sympathetically.
They were inside the Alcázar. The nerve center of the Federation, buried in the bottom of Providence where space was the greatest commodity of all. Real estate carved from the rock itself, each centimeter costing more as man drilled deeper.
The building was not really a building, but more of a repurposing. After the scorching of the sky and the poisoning of the dirt and the oceans, after the people had crept down into the crags of Providence and had their food sent in from the colonies, the Senate dispatched teams of men and machines to pick apart the glories of the past and bring them down into the pit. Their greatest challenge had been transporting the pyramid from Giza to the glut of a city. Citizens lined the streets as block after block arrived, laser-tagged and marked, to be assembled perfectly and then drilled into. The president’s quarters were in the cap, the Star Chamber just below. The great hallways and empty spaces were hewn from the internals of the structure, hollowing out history until only the shell of the past remained. The hidden rooms of the dead pharaohs were forgotten.
Hess’s temporary office sat two thirds of the way up the structure and looked out over the vast courtyard in front of the pyramid. In a city so desperate for space, it was an ostentatious display of emptiness, without fountains or statues or anything at all apart from a haggard oak right in the center of the courtyard, dragged down from the surface and instructed to flourish. A fleeting reminder of the former greenery of this exhausted world, surrounded by armed guards.
The courtyard was normally vacant but not today. Hundreds of the poor had clambered down past their betters, assembled in front of the Alcázar and launched a protest. Signs and shouting. Colony wretches of every color, craving change.
“They’ve been there five days,” Hess said. “It always ends the same way.”
The protestors crept closer. They would never be allowed to reach the tree but they swung antique saws and workers’ tools. Watching them closely, guards gathered.
“What do they want?” Alison remained seated.
“A chance,” he said.
Hess turned and walked back to his desk. His shoes were made from the finest leather, from out near Aztec. Slaughtered at the setting of a dying star, the wounded light kissed the cow’s hide like a blessing. He moved softly and soundlessly across the room, ostentatiously hushed. It was important that people hear the expense in every silent step.
As entertaining a distraction as this girl was, Hess still had difficulty looking past his own self-loathing. Every day in his life, he had dreamed of being the President of the Federation. Instead, he was nothing. The expensive shoes, the office in the Alcázar, the half-command of ancient languages: it was all for nothing.
An alarm pinged and a message wrote itself into the wood and vanished. A summons to the Star Chamber. President Saito had summoned him. Hess ignored it.
“Alison, I need to ask you something. Exactly what do you know… about me?”
She looked up, her big eyes illuminating the room. A self-conscious hand covered her neck.
“Well…” She wandered into the words. “I think I know enough.”
“And that would be?”
The shoulders sagged and Alison looked Hess dead in the eye.
“I know you lost. You lost the election to Saito and now you’re licking your wounds. I know you come from a colony and I know that no one who isn’t from Earth has ever been elected. I know my father made a very large donation to your campaign… after I specifically asked him to. I know that you agreed to meet me today, even though you lost. We’re similar people, I think, but…”
Her voice trailed away. The alarm sounded again. Another summons. Hess ignored it again, noticing her staccato syllables and the way her inflection piqued at the end of every sentence.
“The accent,” asked Hess, sidestepping. “Mars?”
“Born and raised…” Alison stopped.
“Hmm?” Hess arched his eyebrows. “Born and raised, but…?”
“It’s complicated.” The girl sat up straight.
“It’s complicated...” Hess echoed. “And you think we are similar?”
“Very.”
“How so?”
Alison looked over her shoulders and into every corner. She dropped to a whisper.
“We’re alone?”
“It’s only me.” Hess nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“Alison, I am positive.” No one spies on a loser, he added silently.
She beckoned Hess to lean across the desk. Intrigued, he bowed forward. He could feel her hot breath as she cupped a hand over his ear.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know that you want to burn it all down.”
Hess leaned back, his face set in stone.
“I do? And what, pray tell, do I want to burn?”
“Not so loud!” Alison’s eyes scanned the room again. A minute ago, she had been calm, composed, and curious. Now, she had the rapid twitches of a paranoid addict.
“Alright.” Hess humored her. “What could I possibly want to destroy?”
“I know you, Acton Hess.” Her voice was a storming whisper, snatching all of his attention. “I know exactly who you are.”
How could she possibly know? Hess was incredibly careful about his private life. Not that it was fil
led with scandalous secrets. Far worse, in fact. It was boring.
“You grew up a colony brat, just like me,” she spat, her voice grating with suppressed anger. “Poor and worthless. No one liked you. No one gave you a chance. And now you’re running for the biggest office there is? You can’t want to let them win. You want to get in there and bring it all crashing down from the inside. End the reign of the rich and the powerful, end the dynasty of all these Earthbound fools who won’t let the rest of us have anything.”
Alison’s eyes focused into fierce pinholes, the Martian accent stronger and stronger. Then she sat very still, watching for any reaction.
The alarm on the desk broke the silence. A slew of messages, visible only to Hess, made it clear that his presence was critical.
“I think”—Hess stood up—“that you need to come with me.”
Without waiting for an answer, he walked to the door. It opened ahead of him and he heard the rustling of the girl gathering her possessions and running to catch up. The hallways of the Alcázar had been hung with all the recovered works of the past. Portraits and sculptures and ceremonial axes and flags planted in distant planets, plastered over concrete walls cut from the ancient stone of the pyramid. The high ceilings caused her footsteps to echo between the occasional dab of natural light, smuggled down long mirrored tunnels which wound through the Warrens all the way up to the sky.
Earth had been ravaged by endless wars. Humanity burrowed deeper and deeper, carving out a city under the continents. The rich left the poor behind, tunneling closer and closer to the warm beating heart of the planet. The city was stratified, carved into ventricles. Those that had drilled farthest down were most protected, shielded from the cold sky and the vexing complaints of the colonies. Alison’s shoes clapped against the heated floor.
“Hey, you can’t just walk away!” She was struggling to keep up. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You are the daughter of one of the richest men on Mars, Alison Yotam.” Hess picked up the pace. “What would your father say if he heard you?”
“Adopted daughter. And I’m right. You know I am. You just won’t admit it.”