by David Ryker
Don’t lose it.
The angel on his shoulder.
They cut up your boy.
The devil, too.
Loreto felt his whole body shiver as though his bones were collapsing. He punched a bare patch of wall and unleashed a guttural yell. His felt a bone break in his fist, a knuckle maybe. The pain was reassuring, tangible. He nursed his hand and cursed.
When he turned around, he saw his crew watching him. He saw the Exiles and Of the Hanged Tree, examining him through a vacant mask. He approached the leader.
“This,” he whispered. “This never happened. You’ll prepare his body and send it back to us and we will never, ever mention this again.”
“Ad-mir-al.” Coarse and emotionless. That made him even more angry. “Our–”
“I don’t give a damn.” The softness raged in Loreto’s whisper. “You don’t snatch our dead from space for your experiments. We’re more than that. We’re more than your hall of dead species, you hear me?”
They don’t see us as people, they don’t see us as anything more than the latest in a long line of lab experiments they can use to deal with their own problems.
“Listen to me now,” Loreto announced, stepping back. He dragged a finger vertically through the air. “This… means yes.”
The Exiles stared blankly at him but he didn’t dare turn to his crew. He had to convince them to trust these creatures but he wasn’t sure he could trust them himself. They’re more like the Symbiot than us, he thought. The dead are just a tool to further their own agenda. He drew a horizontal line.
“This means no.”
Of the Hanged Tree mimicked his motion.
“You don’t need to cut us open to find out about us,” Loreto told the Exile. “We can teach you. We want to teach you. Now, will you send this boy’s remains back to my ship? Yes or no.”
He could hear the crew behind him, not breathing, waiting for the alien to answer.
“Ye-sss,” the Exile hissed.
Loreto needed to look at the Vela. He had to see her, to remind himself that this was all real, that he had a home worth fighting for. He walked to the little window and saw her. Beautiful, he told himself and wondered whether he believed it. Even now, he was worried about what that codex had done. He’d welcomed the Exiles into the nerve center of his ship and he was starting to regret it.
“You’re going to get me more copies of that codex,” he said, still staring out the window.
“Ye-sss.”
A nice, simple answer but the admiral wasn’t listening. He stared at the Vela and saw too much movement. Smaller ships? What the hell?
“Hertz?” His voice was rushed. “You haven’t heard anything from Cavs?”
“Nothing, sir.”
Nothing was bad. Loreto saw the cannon fire. Holy hell.
“We’re getting back there,” he shouted. “Now!”
Another shot, another explosion. Loreto ran for the shuttle.
22
Hess
“You’re really not as clever as you think you are, Acton Hess.”
The Spartans laughed at him. They didn’t care about the hundreds of Senate soldiers drinking up the courage to launch a coup. They reclined on their hard-concrete chairs, the light from the twin suns piercing through the long window and bouncing around the bare walls.
“They’re not here to negotiate!” he tried again. “It’s Van Liden, he’s–”
Ghoulam’s smile cut him short. The Spartan leader’s tanned skin and heavy stubble creased, revealing two rows of pristine white teeth. The crowd laughed again, all broad smiles and callused fingers. A chipped nail colony with an artisan’s touch, all wearing off-white overalls and shorn heads. Ever since he’d arrived, the entire society just felt wrong. Overconfident, floating through the clouds to escape reality like their mountaintop city.
Maybe fifty people packed the room, sitting without any apparent hierarchy. There was so little pomp and circumstance, it made Hess uncomfortable. After the backchannel impossibilities of trying to set a meeting during the election, such a lack of ceremony worried him. Endless meetings with representatives of representatives had bought him a five-minute discussion. Here, it seemed as though anyone could just walk up to Ghoulam and tell him their innermost secrets. The room billowed again with atmosphere and ambivalence. Hess hated being ignored.
Ghoulam led him to the window. Through the glass and under the night sky, between the spiderweb cracks, he saw hundreds of buildings on top of black sheer mountains. A colony shrouded in lies and propaganda, happy to let the universe think they were destitute.
“Hess, my friend.” Ghoulam’s rough accent sounded so authentic and sincere. “You should really stop and think things through.”
“But…” Hess looked around the room. No one cared about their conversation. “But why aren’t you worried? You saw what happened to Fletcher? We need to pull together, we need to be united, we need–”
“We need,” Ghoulam interjected, “to look out for ourselves.”
The light of the twin suns twinkled in the man’s eye like a zircon gem, all cheap and flashy. They stood watching the horizon, drinking it in. Every passing second made Hess worry more; they didn’t have time to waste.
“Listen, Hess,” Ghoulam said finally. “Do you ever read history? It’s a long thing, it’s getting longer. But I can’t stop, you know. Especially all the ancient books about space.”
Hess, nonplussed, just listened.
“Yeah, the Chinese, let me tell you about the Chinese. Sometimes, they’d be staring up at the sky and they’d see something new. A new dot of light up there, right? They called it a guest star, ain’t that nice? A guest star. To them, it was like a new visitor. They thought of them like comets, I guess. Something transient.”
Ghoulam tapped his own chin as he thought.
“Only, it wasn’t a star, was it? It was a supernova. They were sitting there, thinking all twee about this guest star and, millions of light years away, an entire system was collapsing. Think about that.”
Hess tried but his mind drew a blank. All he could think about was Van Liden.
“You’re struggling, I can tell.” Ghoulam flashed his infectious smile. “What I’m saying is: Things happen, Hess. Systems collapse. Stars die. But from a long way away, it doesn’t matter all that much. We’re out here, we’re been shut out of your damn Federation and, to us, it doesn’t really matter if the Senate does this or that. Either buy our ships or get gone, you know?”
“But they won’t stop with the Federation.” Hess felt the exasperation in his voice. “They’ll come for you next. These aliens, they’re–”
“Hess, mate,” Ghoulam slapped his arm. “Who even says we’re gonna be here when they come calling?”
The Spartan walked away, laughing to himself. Left behind with only his imagination for company, Hess chased after him. Ghoulam moved through the party like a fish swimming through a stream but Hess found himself running up against person after person. Their short hair and similar outfits all looked the same to him and they all tried to offer him food and drink. Even as he refused, it took him a few minutes to reach the collection of benches where the leader sat in a circle of his people.
“You’ve got to listen to me, Ghoulam,” Hess said, barging into the seat next to him. “Or we’re all screwed.”
Ghoulam didn’t seem to care who listened to their conversation. He leaned back and bit into a red apple.
“We’ve spent centuries on the fringes of the Federation, Hess,” the man said, chewing. “It wasn’t us who shot down ships that tried to cross through the Pale. That was your people. We’ve tried to leave a hundred times and the Federation has locked us up and told the universe how savage we are. And now you need us?”
“You have the best ships.” Hess stared into the man’s honest eyes. “We’re all under threat. I don’t understand why you don’t… Why you don’t seem to care?”
“You’re asking us to fight for a
humanity we don’t know, who we don’t recognize. We were happy to listen to your man talk but what did he tell us that we didn’t already know? Tell me.”
The meeting with Saito had been a disaster. The president had refused to meet any of the Spartan requests halfway. Freer trade, visas, a say over the interplanetary media; he’d shot it all down.
Hess was getting annoyed. People seemed determined to act against their own interests. In his plans, everyone acted sanely. In reality, they were random. Even with the threat of annihilation hanging over them, the Federation and the colonies seemed more interested in settling petty disputes.
“I’ll tell you this now, Acton.” Ghoulam laid the apple core on an empty plate. “Because, against my better judgement, I like you.”
Hess ignored the jibe and looked toward the door. Van Liden wouldn’t bother knocking. Ghoulam laughed a little and turned his earnest eyes to the rest of the party.
“You’re not as clever as you think you are, Hess. That’s the truth. There’s bigger forces at work here.”
“I know,” Hess interrupted. “The aliens. The Symbiot.”
“Not quite.” Ghoulam stood up and left; Hess followed him again. “Bigger than that. For us, anyway. What would we care if some strangers from outside the Pale choose to wipe out fifty colonies? What would we care?”
“They’ll come for you next.” Hess couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “This is a war–”
“This is a war,” Ghoulam said over his shoulder. “That’s the first right thing you’ve said. It’s a war and it’s been going on far longer than you know. There are forces in motion, Hess, far larger than you ever expected. I’ll admit, I never expected you to try and set up this meeting. But I knew this would happen. You expect too much from people, Hess, that’s your problem. Just enough cunning but not enough cynicism to see the bigger picture.”
Striding across the room, Ghoulam leaned down and whispered in people’s ears. Everyone he passed broke out in a grin. It’s like magic, Hess realized. He’s charming them all, leading them along in his plan. But leading them where? The man talked in riddles and he obstinately refused to understand the stakes of the situation. It felt like trying to argue in a dream.
“If we don’t work together”—Hess pushed past people in overalls—“there won’t be anything left. They cut through our biggest Fleet like it was nothing.”
“Your biggest fleet,” Ghoulam said pointedly. “You have nothing left.”
“We have Loreto.” Hess knew how desperate he sounded. “He sent us this message, you’ve got to–”
As he fumbled around, trying to find his page, Ghoulam turned and cocked his head.
“I don’t have to do anything, Hess.”
Then he turned away and walked through the party, slapping arms and laughing and picking up a drink and sharing it with his people. Hess trailed after him, whispering in his ear.
“Listen, I want to see it all broken up as much as anyone. More than you. I hate Saito more than you could ever imagine. Van Liden? All of them. I want to burn it all down and give actual power back to the colonies and give people a say in a Federation which isn’t just a money-making machine for Earthbound elites.”
As the confession slipped out of Hess’s mouth, it accelerated, rolling faster and faster down the side of the mountain like an avalanche.
“I wanted to be president to break it all up,” Hess urged. “But I need there to be something left afterwards.”
Ghoulam smiled again and Hess felt unnerved. The Spartan leader wrapped a friendly arm around his shoulder and led him toward the back of the room, up the large concrete steps, until they stood at the rear of the party, looking over the people bathed in the cherry blossom light.
“We understand, Acton Hess. We see you, with your landing port pin and your noble intentions. We know you’re not like them.”
“Then why aren’t you helping? Why aren’t you worried?”
“Acton, do you remember when we first reached out to you?”
The entire campaign had slowed to a crawl in the days before the election. Saito held a comfortable lead and Hess had shed staffers by the hour. Votes, previously promised to him by Senators, evaporated and he’d felt the walls closing in. As much as he’d pleaded, begged, bribed, and bargained with people, the votes just didn’t exist.
And then a little old man had approached one of his staff, telling all the right stories and making all the right donations until he earned a meeting with Hess himself. The man, crooked and weathered, wore a space port pin on his breast and sat down opposite the presidential candidate and sighed. After infuriating amounts of small talk, he stood to leave.
Hess had thought the man was a joke, sent by Saito to mock him and waste more precious hours. But then, from the doorway, he’d turned and offered a meeting with the people who had been essentially exiled from the Federation. It had been the beginning of an awkward friendship. Afterward, a series of intermediaries with their own intermediaries passed along coded messages full of half commitments. Plausible deniability reigned supreme; meeting with the renegade colony would have lost him the election.
Ultimately, the sit-down lasted all of five minutes. Hess met with supposed Spartans in a dark bar in the basement of the ancient Empire State. They had said nothing of note, nothing beyond simple pleasantries. Three days later, an anonymous donor flooded his campaign coffers with hideous sums, enough to close the gap but not enough to win.
Hess remembered his feelings of helplessness as all of his ambitions slipped through his fingers.
“We recognized an anger in you,” Ghoulam said. “A sense of injustice. You might have preached unity, but we saw the twinkle of division in your eye.”
Suddenly self-conscious, Hess blinked twice. He considered himself a guarded person, but here was a man reading his innermost thoughts. He felt betrayed by his own ambitions.
“I never said any of that,” he managed. “You assumed.”
“Correctly,” Ghoulam stated. “You’re not alone in your anger, Acton.”
“If we’re not alone, then why didn’t I win?”
He’d asked himself that question a hundred times and the answer was always Saito. Rich, arrogant, and moneyed. A born politician with all of the perks.
“There was never any question of winning. Saito was built for the role. It was arranged long before you were even a blip on the political radar. There are too many interested parties for anyone but the chosen candidate to win. You would never have won. You don’t have the right profile. The right genes. You were born all wrong, Acton. We all were.”
Hess felt his lungs halt, his skin prickle, and his toes curl. The inside of his shirt dripped with sweat, curling along his spine. He felt his entire world collapsing quietly. But Saito would be here soon; he had to focus.
“Then why—” he stuttered and Ghoulam smiled. “Why send me all that money or arrange this meeting?”
“We like you, Acton Hess. For all your flaws. You’re an asset. You may be a weasel—a conniving and sniveling weasel who is not as clever as he thinks he is—but we like you. And we like it when Earth folks get the fritters. You had them worried for a while.”
Hess looked around the room. The Spartans were dwindling in numbers. Some still lay around, continuing their conversations, but there were less of them. He could hear the running water in distant rooms and the birdsong outside.
“That’s a strange reason for setting up this meeting with Saito,” he said. “Why break from all that history? Because you like me?”
This time, Ghoulam smiled wide.
“Excellent, Hess. Now you are beginning to think clearly.”
“What does that mean?” Hess was irritated and alone and he couldn’t think straight. “Just tell me what you mean. Please.”
“That’s fair. You’re useful, Hess. This meeting, your campaign—they provide cover. They create divisions between the Federation and our people. They’re excellent pretexts. This situation
will not continue much longer.”
Hess remembered where they were. He remembered Van Liden and the rest with the weapons. He remembered that they were stomping down the hallways. He’d spent mere minutes talking to Ghoulam but the man had managed to distract him like a magician turning the audience’s attention elsewhere. He turned to the room and saw there were only three people left. The rest had disappeared.
“You want him to attack you,” Hess realized. “And you’re going to fight back.”
“And you will be the witness, Acton. A man from the Senate. An impartial observer. Though we both know that’s a lie.”
“You mean they were right?” Hess looked around for heavy furniture to hide behind.
He heard heavy footsteps outside the door. The Spartans had vanished.
“We’ve brought our plans forward especially, Hess.”
The man smiled and Hess desperately searched for his page. I’ve got to play him Loreto’s message, he thought. Maybe he’ll realize what’s happening. As he rifled through his pockets, he looked into Ghoulam’s eyes. Wells of sincerity with depths he couldn’t ever hope to understand.
“I know I’m not as clever as I think I am,” Hess begged. “But we have to stand together and fight, Ghoulam. There’s too much at stake. This isn’t some play or some plot.”
“Try telling them that.”
The Spartan leader stood still and watched. He drew a deep breath and flashed a cryptic smile.
“Please,” Hess repeated.
The doors burst open and the Senate guards stormed in, weapons in their hands. Van Liden stepped out from the crowd, a lit cigarette hanging from his lips.
23
Loreto