The Memnon Incident: Part 4 of 4 (A Serial Novel)

by Marc DeSantis

  He had produced a million mines and acquired two ships for the mission. Black Moon had tracked the Halifaxian ships' destination and beat them to Memnon, laying the mines for them to crash into when they displaced. The Halifaxians were to blame Memnon for the deed and King Maurice was to run to Evander for help. Even if he did not, Otis would have pushed hard for Tartarean intervention on behalf of Memnon. They could not allow the Republic to advance its bases so close to the border of Tartarus, was the argument he had rehearsed.

  Then everything had gone wrong. Black Moon had performed its task but had run into an ancient warship that had been drifting for tens of thousands of years. The little ship had been destroyed but survivors had made it onto the Morrigan and were now in the custody of the RHN. The ATS Snow Tiger had been sent to meet up with the Black Moon and atomize it to eliminate anyone with knowledge of the mission. No one on Snow Tiger except its captain, Cornelius Duarte, had been privy to what was going on. The destruction of Black Moon was to be a quick and clean kill of a supposed pirate ship, something that happened often enough that it would be unremarkable to the Snow Tiger's crew. Snow Tiger too had run afoul of Morrigan, and had run all the way back to Tartarus with an unbelievable but true story. Then there had been a shootout in Memnon between the Engagement Force and the RHN. Triumph had been wrecked. Word had come via Gazelle that the antimatter bomb had been interpreted as a sneak Halifaxian strike by Captain Acton, just as Otis had intended. He spared a brief thought for Donner. He'd been a good kid but sometimes sacrifices had to be made. He was more affected by the destruction of Amity, his old ship. It was all for the greater good of Tartarus, Otis repeated to himself.

  The Armada squadron remained the stronger of the two, even after the loss of Amity and the crippling of Triumph, and so the Halifaxians had departed, leaving Memnon in Tartarean hands. So war had come as Otis had wished, but the security of the mission was unraveling fast. As head of the MMI, Otis could block some avenues of inquiry, but not forever. Instead of bringing down Evander by the hand of Halifax, he would have to do so with his own. Everything that he did, every life he had spent, had been done for Tartarus, his beloved home. He drew the pistol from his pocket and held it as his side.

  The king was waiting for him in his office. It was tastefully appointed, bearing none of the grandiose furnishings that often festooned the palaces of warlords and potentates in the Great Sphere. Evander was seated at a large mahogany desk, with several compads strewn about it. He was reading a printout of some kind. Otis raised his gauss pistol, aiming squarely at the king's heart. "Who are you?" he demanded.

  Evander looked up abruptly from his papers. His eyes narrowed in sad recognition. "The traitor is revealed at last," he said. "I should have known. I had discounted you from the start. Yet who else could have gotten his hands on so many mines and the antiquakraft technology used in this operation?" Then he breathed deeply. You ask a silly question, Etienne. You know full well who I am."

  "No," Otis said. "Who are you? What are you? Don't try to lie to me. If I don't get the truth right now I will put a slug through you."

  "I suppose then that I will have to be believable," Evander said. "Since you hold the pistol, I think that truth is the best option."

  Otis nodded. "Go on."

  "I am Evander the First, the immortal king of the Monarchonate of Tartarus, descended from a group of humans taken from Old Earth in the distant past to be the companions of a race of aliens that roamed the galaxy seeding worlds with specimens they took from elsewhere. Through their advanced bioengineering I have been granted an indefinite lifespan, killable, yes, as you seem to have surmised" - Evander nodded at the pistol that trembled in Otis' hand - "but functionally deathless in the manner that you would understand such things. I have come to Tartarus from beyond the furthest human-inhabited worlds to save humanity from itself, and from some other things that are much worse."

  Otis blinked. Then a grin slowly spread across his face. Then he guffawed. "You expect me to believe that claptrap! I am not some peasant just brought in from the fields to learn to operate a gravtank or use a computer!" He shook his head. "I don't get. Even now, with death hanging over your head, you still have to keep up the charade. I am the chief military intelligence officer of Tartarus!" Otis roared. "You can't fool me. I'll give you credit. You covered your tracks so well that every avenue I pursued came up at a dead end. I could never find out where you were born, where you grew up, who your parents were . . ."

  "I've told you many times, Etienne that . . ."

  "Don't call me Etienne anymore, as if we are friends," Otis snapped. "I am an admiral in the Armada of Tartarus. I was an officer before you showed up too. I will remain one after you are gone. I don't work for you anymore. Call me Admiral Otis if you must call me anything."

  Evander shrugged. "I did not realize that such an intimacy was so unpleasant to you, Admiral Otis." He paused. "Have you ever considered that the reason you came up cold on every avenue you followed is because I have been telling you the truth all along?"

  "That you were born on a starship in the Andromeda Galaxy sixty thousand years ago? That you were raised as a valued companion to some transdimensional entities that kidnaped your parents from Old Earth? Do you take me for an idiot?"

  "No, I don't, but I do take you for someone who refuses to accept the improbable, but still possible, even though you have, as you have said, found nothing to contradict my story."

  "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," Otis replied.

  "True, very true." Evander sighed. "Yet I do not have the means to demonstrate the truth to you. Not to the extent that you would find sufficient. I can't fly or read minds. Would that I could! I would have ferreted you out as a traitor a long time ago. I can't replicate the means by which I was myself rendered immortal. That was done to me by the aliens and they never shared the secret with me. I would grant such a boon to all of my people were it in my power to do so."

  "So very hard to believe," Otis sneered. "It is a big lie. You must think that we will swallow it because it is such an incredible story. How could he expect anyone to believe such a startling falsehood? It is must be true, I have heard people say on many occasions. I don't buy it."

  "Admiral Otis," Evander said. "I expected better from you. You know that the Halifaxians call me 'the Sphinx.'"

  "Of course."

  "They have made the same conceptual error that you have, admiral. They have eliminated, as far as can be told, all of the more probable explanations for my origin, and yet can't bring themselves to accept that the last possibility is the truth. I am not sure what else I would have had to do to prove that I possess superior knowledge. I have come to Tartarus bearing great gifts that have improved the health and well-being of all Tartareans. They live longer, are better fed, and more secure than ever before. When I arrived three decades ago one could scarcely farm in the poor soil of a world warmed only a cool red star. Agricultural production quintupled within just a few years of my coming. Deadly diseases have been cured. The pirates that troubled our system for generations have been exterminated. The borders of Tartarus are now light years distant, not the hazy no man's space between the worlds of our outer system. I would think that a special man was behind all that. Is it so unbelievable to you that I am who and what I say I am?"

  "Frankly, yes," said Otis. "You and your alien origin story. You have declined to give the names of these creatures that kept you and your people as companions for eons. Who were they? It is suspicious that you have divulged so little about such powerful beings."

  Evander nodded. "Again, I have told only the truth, but have withheld such information that would prove detrimental to my cause."

  "The unification of humanity under the banner of Tartarus? Is that your cause or is it simple megalomania that drives you to conquest after conquest? These wars will never end. They will simply pause so that you can regroup and push on again."

  Evander closed his eyes. When he opened them, he
said, "I suppose that, this being the end, with no way out, I can tell you the larger part of the story."

  "I'm waiting."

  "The aliens have no name for their species. It was not clear to us, the humans with them, that they were even a species as we would conceive it. There were never many of them, just nine discrete entities. Each possessed an apparently limitless power. They called themselves, in the best translation I could give, the Cultivators. They saw themselves as scholars, voyagers, explorers, but above all as the seeders of life in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond."

  "And the point of their abductions? They were gathering humans to spread across the galaxy?"

  "That was their great work, among other things. They seeded other species too, but none more broadly than humans. We are thickly settled in this galaxy, and in others."

  "Then why hide that from us? We speculate all the time that there are worlds far outside the boundaries of the ancient empires."

  "Speculation is one thing," said the king. "Direct confirmation is quite another. There are things out there, beyond the furthest reaches settled by Terran colonization, that would freeze your blood if you knew even a little about them."

  "But still human?"

  "After a fashion. It might cause a panic if humanity at large came to know of the threats that reside elsewhere. Panic would impede my mission to unite humanity so that it is strong enough to meet the challenges that will one day come."

  "Convenient. How long will it be before these 'things' as you say show up?"

  "I can't say. But come they will, and only a reunited empire will have the power to resist them."

  "The Cultivators. Why can't they do something about these enemies?"

  "They have no care to. They are not like us. We were never sure what their ultimate plan was. We guessed that it was to populate the galactic cluster of which the Milky Way is a member. They never shared their longterm goals. In any case they are long gone."

  "Gone? Where did they go?"

  "I have no idea. They grew bored with their project. Perhaps they turned to other pursuits and no longer needed us. They set us free after millennia at their sides. We returned to humanity's birthworld only to find it wasted and nearly uninhabitable."

  "There were few of you, the ones that worked beside the Cultivators? Then whom did they settle on other worlds?"

  "Humans like you or me, but without the benefit of the tutelage that I and my folk received."

  Otis considered what he had heard. Evander was entirely convincing in his presentation of his story. Everything about his demeanor conveyed sincerity and truthfulness.

  The admiral shrugged. "A fine tale you tell. I still do not believe you. Even if you could have convinced me, there is no way that you were leaving this office alive. Your time at the apex of Tartarus is at an end."

  "I knew that," Evander said. "I was not trying to bargain for my life. I have been telling you the truth at all times." The king inclined his head. "Just out of curiosity - how were you going to explain my death or disappearance?"

  "You were assassinated by an insurgent resentful of Tartarean expansion into his homeworld. We would use your loss as a lesson against overreach. We would then retrench and consolidate what we already had."

  Evander considered this. "Alas, that you and your conspirators possess such limited vision! I do not strive to create a Fifth Empire for my own good or out of imperial grandiosity. What is coming will require the strength of a restored galactic empire to combat."

  "So you claim."

  Otis raised his gauss pistol and pressed the trigger. A hypersonic slug slammed into Evander's chest.

  Evander remained standing and unharmed. The slug, deformed into a smallish pancake of tungsten-iridium alloy, slid down and fell to the floor. Otis pressed the trigger again, again, and again, and each time the slugs flattened and then clinked onto the floor of the office.

  "What the. . . a personal shield?" Otis had not believed such a thing possible.

  Evander smiled. "A gem of Cultivator technology. If only I could replicate it. It defies all of my attempts to discover its secrets, and it is worth much when one has to worry about assassins." He stood up from behind his desk and removed a gauss pistol from a drawer and pointed it at Otis.

  "I had not thought that I would need to use this," he said. "There is a first time for everything."

  "You knew all along that I could not hurt you, and yet you played along?"

  "Indeed, I did. I know also of the movements of your fellow coup plotters. They will all be apprehended. The two battalions of ashigaru that were to disarm my Royal Guardsmen so that you could solidify your coup? They will be taking no further part in your putsch." The king seemed disappointed. "Everything I told you is the truth. All of it. I had to withhold things from even my highest-ranking officers out of fear as to what might happen if knowledge of the threat that awaits us in the farthest stars became known. I thought that the benefits that I brought would be enough to quell suspicions about me. I see now that I was wrong." Evander pointed the pistol at the old admiral's head.

  "How will you explain my death?" Otis asked.

  "You died valiantly defending your king from an assassin in the pay of Halifax, Admiral Otis. You will be posthumously awarded the Grand Sunburst for valor. Your state funeral will be magnificent. You can be certain that I will attend."

  Otis was dead before his body hit the floor.

  End Part Four of Four