by David Ryker
He stared at the birthmark on Alison’s neck, sitting alongside her pip. He’d seen a hundred murals and heard the story of Assadias a thousand times but there was nothing he’d ever encountered quite like her.
“But I don’t understand why you’d paint a picture of a failed rebellion? It was a bloodbath.”
“Because”—Hess turned around, expecting her to follow—“the Federation won.”
Alison caught up, leaving the mural behind.
“To remind people of their power?”
“Exactly.”
“So it’s the famous scene, right before they cut off Assadias’s head?”
“Very famous.”
“I remember it. But they never showed it like that.”
“History typically follows geography, you’ll find.”
“You’re telling me it happened differently? Every kid grows up learning about Assadias. It’s practically a bedtime story on Mars. Why show it differently?”
“Because, Alison, the man who swung the blade that day ended up with blood on his hands. Other people remember, too. Legends. Stories. Lies. They all have a use.”
“You think the Spartans want to remember a failed rebellion?”
“I think they want to celebrate anyone who stands up to the Senate.”
Hess pictured the entire clone army painted on the wall. After the war on Mars, the Senate had outlawed cloning. They instituted the pips and the trace gates, steadily tightening their grip on the colony. The mural was a reminder of what they were fighting against.
“Oh.” Alison lifted her hands to her mouth. “I’ve just realized—Red Hand Loreto, he’s–”
Hess nodded and hurried her along. They didn’t have time to dwell too heavily on the past, not when the future presented so many problems.
The Senate delegation had been housed in a collection of apartments above Hess’s quarters. He heard a commotion before rounding the last few corners and, as he approached the large pair of bamboo double doors, he felt the presence of many people on the other side.
Alison led the way into the room and they found a hundred people, laughing and drinking. It felt like a party, with everything from food to servants, all imported from Earth. All of this must have been on Saito’s ship, Hess told himself. They must have brought it all up from the shuttle while we negotiated.
“What’s happening?” Alison yelled over the revelry.
“Split up,” Hess said into her ear. “Try and find out.”
She nodded and disappeared into the crowd. Hess struggled to deal with the volume of people. He could barely squeeze through, even though the room was three times the size of a shuttle pad. But the people didn’t look like senators or trade delegates. He felt an uneasy sensation crawling across his skin.
“Sir!” someone shouted at him.
Hess turned to see Sergeant Patterson propped up against a wall, drink in his hand.
“Patterson,” Hess shouted. “What is all this? What are we celebrating?”
“Damned if I know,” hiccoughed the guard. “No one tells us anything.”
A hint of resentment underlaid his words.
“Where’s Saito?”
“Damned if I know,” Patterson repeated, sliding down on to the floor. “They got their… fancy team… specialists…”
Patterson’s words drifted and Hess realized the man had fallen asleep. He straightened the guard up, made sure that he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, and then stole the drink from his hand. Spying a cluster of party-goers, he changed tack.
“To the Senate!” he yelled, forcing his way into the group with one hand held high.
The group returned his salutations but eyed him with suspicion.
“Have we heard from the Senate?” Hess tried his best to act drunk, slurring his words and squinting.
“No,” said one woman bluntly. “We have our orders.”
Before he could ask another question, the group disintegrated, leaving Hess alone in the increasingly claustrophobic party.
“Hess.” Alison tugged at his arm and appeared from between two burly men. “Something’s wrong.”
He nodded in agreement.
“My friend told me that the Senate approved this… mission or something. They got recalled while we were away and they’re voting on something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, no one would tell me…”
Hess looked around. The people in the room weren’t politicians or diplomats. Hell, he thought, they’re not even guards.
“They’re soldiers,” he realized, shocked. “This isn’t a trade envoy. It’s a coup.”
They’re going to try and take it from the inside, he thought, and force the Senate to fund a war with Sparta, those goddamn hawks. They don’t even care about the aliens or Loreto’s message. It smelled like Van Liden all over.
“What do we do?” Alison shouted in his ear, pushed around by the shifting crowd.
They were packed in tightly but Hess couldn’t stop thinking. Talk about a Spartan plot, turn the galaxy against them, take their ships, crush their colony, steal everything they had. Hell, they could even blame the renegade colony for Fletcher’s loss. Nothing mattered when the Senate controlled the flow of information.
But it was the product of a vindictive mind, one that thought removing their leader would be a show of strength instead of an act of war. Van Liden didn’t understand anyone who wasn’t from Earth. There was no triumph in it, nothing for people to rally behind. There was a reason they loved Assadias and not Red Hand. It didn’t matter who won; it mattered who dreamed bigger. He didn’t even realize that Spartan ships without Spartan pilots would be useless. His arrogance would kill them all.
“We’ve got to stop them,” he told Alison. “They’re going to waste time here and we won’t be ready for the real war.”
“I thought we wanted the Federation to collapse,” she replied.
And she was right, Hess told himself. Why interrupt your enemies as they formed a circular firing squad?
“Because it won’t be these people who suffer, Alison,” he said, as close to her ear as he could. “It’ll be all the people on the colonies who die first because we couldn’t fight back.”
“But I don’t understand…” she shouted. “They saw what happened to Fletcher, they saw how serious this is…”
“They don’t care. They think they’ll take over Sparta in a day, then use the Spartan Fleet to defeat the aliens and then they’ll be in total control. They’re going to deliberately find themselves a rebellion and crush it. Being at the head of the vanguard will give Saito all the political capital he needs.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s why we have to stop it.”
“So?”
The two of them stood in the churning crowd while people shouted and drank and readied themselves for war. Hess could feel the tension in the room, as well as the excitement. They thought they were going to win.
“You try and delay them here.” He pointed to Alison. “Just try anything. I’m going to warn the Spartans.”
She nodded and slipped into the crowd. Hess didn’t have time to feel angry anymore. He knew he’d been played. Van Liden must have stuck himself in Saito’s ear right after the meeting had been set.
Hess pushed and picked his way through the crowd, trying to cross the room and get back to the entrance. His shoulders were bruised and he felt the sweaty, clammy air tightening his lungs.
“Going somewhere, Acton?”
Van Liden laid a frail arm against the wall, blocking Hess’s route to the door. A lit cigarette hung ever-present from his dry lips.
“Just back to my quarters.” Hess tried to sound amiable. “I… I think I left something there.”
“Oh, won’t you stay for a drink, Acton?”
Van Liden’s hand peeled itself off the wall and his thin, liver-spotted fingers wrapped themselves around Hess’s arm.
“No.” He shrugged aw
ay the grip. “I have some work which really does need my attention. We don’t want to anger the Senate now, do we?”
“Of course not.” Van Liden sneered and dragged hard.
The general stayed still, separating Hess from the exit. The paranoia began to tingle deep in his bones. He knows I know.
“You know—” The scratchy throat itched at the man’s refined Earthbound accent. “You and your type, typically you’re not worth the oxygen we create for you. But I will admit, you do have your uses.”
“Like setting up meetings with the Spartans.” Hess laughed nervously.
“Perhaps.” Van Liden glowered, smoke curling from his nostrils. “We all have our little plans, don’t we?”
He looked beyond Van Liden and saw Saito propping up the bar, that broken expression still in his eyes. The man was shattered at the core and that made having to rely on him all the more infuriating. Just another spoiled rich kid elevated by the Earthbound elites. The truest of human tragedies, to be forever ruled by the worst.
“We all have our little plans,” he continued, “but at some point, we have to ask, where does our loyalty lie? With the men who made us, who could offer us riches beyond our wildest imaginations, who could crush us into absolute nothingness? Or elsewhere? Loyalty is a hell of a thing.”
The general placed a threatening edge on the syllables.
“You know, Van Liden—” Hess took a lungful of air. “Maybe I will have that drink.”
The red cherry of the cigarette bobbed as Van Liden smiled. Hess reached for a liquor glass, taking one from the tray of a passing servant. As soon as it was in his hand, he smelled the fumes and his teeth chattered. He raised it up in the air, looking the general in the eye.
“To Saito,” he announced.
As the two men prepared to clink their glasses together, Hess flicked his wrist. The entire drink spilled on to Van Liden’s head. The general jumped up, shocked, his hand hitting into a nearby soldier, who spun around with a raised fist.
In the commotion, Hess slipped away and made straight for the door. Behind him, he heard shouting and shattering glass. He had planned for the strong alcohol to ignite and set Van Liden’s head on fire. But not everyone gets what they want, he thought as the door closed on the chaos.
20
Cavs
“How long they been out there?”
“I don’t know, Vanis.” Cavs felt the itch of irritation. “Stop asking.”
“Why’d he leave you in charge, anyway?”
As a punishment, Cavs thought. As a way of putting me in my place.
“Because you ask too many questions,” he said.
“Seems like asking questions is what got you put in charge… if you ask me.”
“No one asked you, Vanis.”
“Figures.”
In the hours they’d been alone, Cavs had tired of his taste of authority. After the trouble on Olmec, Loreto had left him in charge of a stuttering, unreliable ship while he went and played with the aliens. The Vela creaked and groaned around him, the drip-drip-drip of distant coolant mocking him from the shadows.
The enemy, Cavs told himself, but he desperately wanted to be out there himself. The glory lay at the right hand of the admiral as he contacted alien races, not in babysitting the ship, though there were privileges. Perched in the pulpit in the dimly lit bridge, he demanded that the staff show him star map after star map, charting imaginary paths to Mars, imagining how he’d show up in his old neighborhood with an entire fleet at his back. He’d even sent the Sirens out to scan the floating wreckage, gathering data about the aftermath of their first battle which he could present to Loreto upon his return.
Cavs hadn’t lived onboard long enough to know the ship down to the tiniest details but he knew his guns. Ever since Loreto installed that alien codex, everything was off. Trying to calibrate the cannons was impossible; all the readings were wrong. The star maps seemed full of glitches and static. His team complained constantly to him about the weird readings. Now, on the bridge, it was the same: shields draining too much power, engines pushing way past their red lines, data networks running slow then fast then slow again. Little things but they added up.
With every other officer dispatched to the rest of the First Fleet, corralling information and battle plans, Cavs had been left in charge. He’d brought his whole department up to the bridge, determined that they’d see him wielding his authority. He felt indebted to them, even friendly. Day and Rucker were fine, exploring the bridge while the Vela waited beside the Pale. But Vanis had been at his elbow the entire time, asking insipid and insistent questions over and over again. The man was a hypochondriac and a neurotic.
“We should start worrying?”
Vanis again, phrasing statements like questions. The man was a mathematician—and a damned fine one at that—but he possessed a grating personality. Cavs shook his head and stared at the projection, remembering officer school. The way the galaxy was arranged, it all seemed so inhumane.
Colonies were scattered across planets. Planets were grouped into solar systems. Solar systems were connected by the trace gates, which opened a direct and clear path along which ships could travel as fast as human technology permitted without having to worry about collisions. At that speed, even the slightest knock could destroy a vessel.
The Senate policed the trace gates mercilessly. Any ship could attempt inter-system travel, could chance their lives by travelling outside of the clearly defined paths. But it was a gamble for smugglers and scavengers. Asteroids, black holes, ice clusters, and even old probes from Earth were a risk when travelling too fast.
Every time a ship failed to make it, the wreckage was left behind and became an obstacle for the next gambler trying to move between systems without the Senate’s permission. Travel between colonies was tightly regulated. It was a method of control, of crushing insurrection before it could begin. The colonies’ power lay in their numbers, so the Senate made gathering together difficult. Not for the first time, Cavs wondered why he was a part of it all.
The First Fleet, not in possession of the Vela’s current technical issues, lagged behind them. Loreto, so desperate to meet the Exiles, had raced ahead. Eventually, the Argo and Suhail and all the rest rolled into position and Cavs seized the opportunity to play admiral by arranging them in defensive positions along the Pale, overlooking the field of debris left over from the aliens’ battle. That had filled some time.
Cavs slumped forward in the pulpit. Out here on the edge of the Pale, they didn’t have anything. Too far to talk to the other fleets and the only colony close by was dead and buried. All the action was on the Exile ship and he was stuck on the Vela with nothing to do.
“We should probably try to contact them?”
“No, Vanis.”
His thoughts drifted to the black codex soldered to the admiral’s desk. Everyone in this godforsaken Fleet was slavishly devoted to the man like he was their own damn father. If Loreto wanted to be on that alien ship, let him. The more time he spent around the man, the less Cavs felt enamored with him. All his slavish devotion and idolization had evaporated the moment Loreto had chewed him out in front of the crew.
Right there, Cavs thought, looking down from the pulpit. That’s where it happened.
The lights wavered again and Cavs heard someone up in the rafters slap the side of a terminal. The ship was old and rickety but it should, at least, be reliably defective. This overpowered and unpredictable Vela was just wrong. He knew how the unseen officer felt: it was fine for machines to work badly, as long as they worked badly all the time. In space, fickleness killed.
“Sir!”
Part of the map flashed red, and an alarm sounded.
“Sir!”
It took Cavs a moment to realize that the person was shouting at him.
“What?” He snapped upright in the pulpit. “What’s happening? Another error?”
The map glitched, entire sections of space disappearing.
&nb
sp; “Movement out there,” another person called out from above.
Probably Loreto’s lifeless corpse being jettisoned from the Exile ship. Humor just reminded Cavs of his problems.
“What kind of movement?”
“Small band of ships, Earthwise.” The map adjusted, zooming in on a section. “Not Federation ships.”
“Civilian?” asked Cavs. Out beside the Pale, there should be no one else. There just wasn’t any money in it. “Double check your instruments, you know how they’ve been. Get in touch with the rest of the Fleet, find out what Coen and Lyor are saying.”
“Double and triple checked, sir. It’s movement. And it’s not ours.”
Where the hell is Loreto? Cavs felt the questions infesting his mind. Why am I stuck doing this? Is it the Symbiot?
“I want data, now. Set up a comms link.”
That sounded like something the admiral would say, Cavs assured himself. Could be the Symbiot, back for more. Or an Exile surprise attack. Could even be Fletcher’s fleet, doing a victory lap of the Pale. No, he decided. Not government. Pay attention to the details, Jimmy.
“Loreto left me in charge,” Cavs said aloud and felt ridiculous.
“We… we know, sir. Jimmy,” said Vanis, warily. “What do we do?”
“I told you.” Cavs looked back at the map. “Comms link. Tell me who they are.”
Tiny ships, not fighters, not anything from the Fleet. Definitely civilian, but that didn’t mean they were friendly. He remembered what the Symbiot had done on Olmec. This could be them, corrupting civilian ships. He bit his tongue as he racked his thoughts.
“Looks like scavengers, sir.”
That was Day’s voice. Cavs looked up into the pitch black. How the hell were you supposed to see anyone? How did Loreto do it? The light from the projection meant everyone else was cloaked in darkness. It was impossible to see where voices were coming from.
“Scavengers?” he repeated.
Vanis sidled up to the pulpit and cleared his throat, preparing to employ his dry wit.
“Civilians, Jimmy. They scavenge scrap and collect it from space… and then sell it. It’s how they make a living?”