by Evan Currie
“Captain,” the colonel said through clenched teeth, “you’re treading dangerously close to insubordination.”
Sorilla laughed openly at him.
Treading hell, I just danced over that line with cleats on and that’s the best you can manage?
She knew when she was dealing with a paper pusher and really should probably lay off him in all reality. It wasn’t his fault, after all. He wasn’t much more of a cog in the machine than she was…arguably less, really. Just a delivery boy, really. What was worse was that he was a desk slave, which meant he was likely to be a lot touchier about protocol than she’d ever been, let alone than she was now.
The problem was…she really wasn’t in the mood.
“Colonel,” she told him evenly, “you’re going to go back and you’re going to file a complaint with the brigadier about my attitude, right? Should I tell you, perhaps, what the old man will do with that complaint? Once he gets finished laughing in your face, I mean?”
The man was the perfect picture of rigid indignation, but as he turned red in the face, Sorilla saw recognition set in and nodded knowingly.
“You’ve been with the old man long enough to know,” she said. “So let’s not play games. There’s nothing in this brief about why the old man or SOLCOM wants me back. I’m tired, Colonel. I’ve fought my wars. Why me?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” the colonel told her dryly.
“Then tell the old man I said ‘hi’ and ‘no,’” she said, slapping the now-empty card against his chest.
He clutched at it, stumbling back half a step. “Excuse me, Captain! You’re being recalled—”
“Shove it, Colonel, I know the regs,” Sorilla told him. “Short of an open declaration of war, SOLCOM can’t deny me my mandated leave…especially since the service shrinks all said I was on the ragged edge and advised medical leave before the Child of God Op. I’ve already put in my papers, so I’ll be discharged long before my leave time is done, Colonel. Tell the old man I said no thanks and to watch his six.”
She rolled her eyes, turning away from him.
“Captain! Captain!” he called after her, but she just flipped him off as she walked, knowing that Mattan would get a kick out of that in the report if nothing else.
*****
The retro firing of rockets caught her as she was tweaking the MOFAs’ programming slightly with new designs for the home they were about to build. The excavations units had run into iron deposits close to the surface, which was good for the fabrication units once she’d gotten it all dug out and sent off to the smelter to be pulled into wire for them to weld with, but in the short term it meant a redesign of the sub-Hayden floor.
On the upside, it was going to much improve the safe room and bunker area.
She didn’t bother leaving her work, figuring that whoever it was would wait or not, and she didn’t really care a whole lot which.
The crunch of footsteps on the dirt warned her of the approach long before the person was anywhere near her.
“Don’t want whatever you’re selling,” she said when the footsteps stopped. “Couldn’t afford it I did.”
A deep laugh surprised her.
“Now I know that’s a lie, Captain.”
Sorilla shook her head and set down the MOFA controller she was interfacing with, rising to her feet as she turned.
“Old man,” she said with a crisp nod and a more respectful, if not much neater, salute than she’d offered the colonel, whose name she’d never gotten. “Apparently you’re more serious than I thought you were when you sent the paper hawk.”
Brigadier Mattan chuckled. “I wouldn’t have sent him in the first place if I’d thought you were serious about putting your papers in, Sister.”
Sorilla rolled her eyes. “No one’s called me that in a while. I think I was leading guerrillas here on Hayden the last time, actually.”
“You’ll always be Sister to us,” Mattan told her, nodding to a folding chair that was leaning against a nearby tree. “May I?”
She waved. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the chair and unfolding, groaning as he settled into it. The legs sank into the soil. “I am getting too old for this job. Life extension treatment my aching ass.”
She laughed at him. “You’re not too old, General. You’re too fat.”
He glared at her, but sighed and didn’t dispute it. “Too much time in zero gravity ships with nothing to do but eat while the Navy boys did all the work. Felt like fitness requirements kept getting harder and harder to meet. Now my organs are healthy enough to belong to a twenty-year-old athlete and my bones belong to a ninety-year-old cripple. They never really laid out the consequences of all those years in space, you know. It was all buried in the fine print.”
“Some of us read the fine print, old man,” Sorilla said, half smiling and half saddened.
Bone density loss was one of the few things that was still rather difficult to treat. Prior to the war, the rules had been pretty strict on how many hours one could serve in a microgravity environment, but that had gone out the window in the scramble for space hands. Being administration or, worse, operational tactical command meant a lot of float hours, and while regulations were supposed to keep everyone fit, when your job was planning and execution, it was easy to start skipping your workouts.
“Ah well, I’ll live until I don’t,” Mattan shrugged, “and pain is just reminding me that I’m still winning.”
“You said it, sir,” Sorilla told him.
The brigadier looked around, eyes watching the swarm of robots working with interest.
“Quite the spread you’ve managed to get,” he said after a moment. “We mapped it from the Sol, deep scans by the way. There’s a lot of minerals here, waiting to be pulled up.”
Sorilla shrugged. “Nothing that isn’t cheaper to get in asteroids, I imagine.”
He tipped his head, conceding the point.
Gold, silver, pretty much all the valuable metals of yesteryear were little more than curiosities on the Solar markets. Iron was worth more than gold by a considerable margin. Iron was useful, after all. Gold, aside from minor traces in electronic devices, really had few good general uses to the general public.
The historical value of the metal had turned out to be almost purely fictional in the end. No more real than the paper money that replaced it, or the digital currency that replaced that. In the galaxy they lived in, practical value was real value.
“I suppose, though I’m sure your robots could pull up enough to build almost anything you might want,” he said. “That’s something, at least. Couldn’t do that on Earth anymore.”
That much was true. While Earth wasn’t mined out by any means, all the useful materials were generally a significant distance under the surface, requiring some rather extreme technical miracles to bring them up. Hayden was still a mostly virgin world, with what had once been priceless minerals practically lying around on the surface.
Sure, none of them were worth much on the markets—it would cost far too much to transport significant quantities to Earth, and the local demand for such things was saturated by simple asteroid mining—but for her personal use, almost everything she might need was just sitting there, waiting to be picked up.
“Has to be lonely out here, though,” he observed.
Sorilla laughed at him.
“Old man, when was the last time any of us were lonely in the field?” she asked, shaking her head. “How many months did you spend in the jungles in Brazil? Were you lonely then?”
He waved idly. “Point taken, but you know what I mean. You go a little weird in the head when you’re in the field alone for too long. Maybe it’s not loneliness, but it’s real.”
“I’m fine, General,” Sorilla laughed softly. “This is Hayden, not Earth. It’s a big planet, but a small community. On Earth you can be alone in the middle of New York. Here? More visitors drop by to chat in a week than I ever met with while traini
ng at Bragg.” She took a breath and looked around. “I put in for the land grant years ago, you know, more on a whim than with any real plan. I wasn’t so tired back then. The idea of retiring was something I joked about. It wasn’t real.”
Mattan nodded.
He remembered that feeling, being young and immortal. By the time he had grown weary, he’d been up for promotion out of the field and behind a desk. It wasn’t what he’d loved, but he had been able to rest finally. Not that he’d recognized it at the time. In that, Aida was well ahead of him. She always did know herself better than he ever did.
“What are your plans for it?” he asked idly, looking around curiously.
The MOFA swarm was building up curving walls out of local cement, and he could see that she would have one hell of a view when the home was complete. If that was all she was interested in, however, she wouldn’t have needed a land grant. There were plenty of incredible views a lot closer to civilization, here and on Earth, that she could have easily afforded.
The Hayden subcontinent wasn’t exactly in high demand. Only half a dozen people had applied for grants out of the entire colony, and he knew that she was the only one of them who hadn’t been born on-world.
Sorilla turned, gesturing out to a stone plateau that rose out of the jungle, masked by drifting clouds along its base. “Do you know what’s out there?”
Mattan looked, but only saw jungle and water and a large bare rock plateau rising up to the clouds, so he shook his head.
“No, can’t say that I do.”
“In addition to more land than anyone could possibly buy on Earth, and all of it rich in potential,” she said, “right there is the original tertiary site scouted for Hayden’s orbital tether. The colonists went with the main continent, but it was really just a coin flip. The two sites were equally viable.”
Mattan frowned, confused. “Alright…”
Sorilla smiled. “It’s always surprising that no one reads the dispatches. I suppose it shouldn’t be. Gil applied to SOLCOM for a second tether just after the war ended, with the stated intent to put diplomatic facilities on a different part of the planet. A lot of Haydenites aren’t ready to have Alliance diplomats and traders living next door just yet, even if they recognize the value of letting SOLCOM use Hayden as a diplomatic point of contact.”
The brigadier general laughed. “So, you own a chunk of land the size of Texas right next to what will likely become the main trade hub between Sol and the Alliance?”
“Not quite that large,” she said mildly. “And next to? Oh no, General, I own the land it will be built on. No one’s figured that out yet, so do keep it to yourself, old man. The rest of the MOFA swarm is already at work up there, putting in buildings, the tether plug foundation, and other facilities that will be needed.”
She fell silent for a while, before going on.
“So you can see why I’m not interested in whatever you want me for.”
Mattan nodded, knowing that they’d come to it finally.
“It might interest you, for all that,” he said. “It’s a joint op with the Alliance.”
As much as she might have tried to deny it, there was no way Sorilla could have hidden her interest in that.
“Well, that’s going to set the hawks among the pigeons,” she said finally. “Can’t be too popular a move, unless I miss my guess.”
Mattan snorted.
That was an understatement if he’d ever heard one. Too many lives had been lost to the Ross, and by extension to the Alliance, for people to much like the idea of working with them for any reason. It had to be done, though, and more…it had to succeed. Otherwise the war would inevitably roll back around, and it was a war that Sol couldn’t win.
So far they’d held their own, and that had bolstered morale powerfully on Earth, but the military men and women who had access to the full breadth of intelligence knew the truth. SOLCOM held key choke points, which permitted them to focus their forces and hold off much stronger opposition, and the Alliance was unfocused and not terribly interested in the sector of space Earth resided in, no matter what the Ross seemed to think. The Alliance was huge, however, a slumbering giant that had nearly swatted humans from the stars accidentally.
Given purpose, that strength must inevitably sweep SOLCOM into the bin of history.
“You might say that,” he told her dryly. “Which is why we need you for this, Captain. You have more field experience with the Alliance than anyone else available.”
“Killing them, General. I have more experience killing them,” she reminded him. “That’s not exactly the sort of experience you want for this.”
“I know you, Aida,” he said gently. “You don’t hold grudges. The killing was never personal for you; it was just the job. Now the job is to work with them, and unlike a lot of people under my command, you’ll actually prefer it that way.”
She sighed. “What’s the op? The brief you sent with your ‘secretary’ didn’t explain that.”
“That’s because it’s classified, at least until it’s over,” he told her, not bothering to mention that would let them carefully bury it if anything went wrong. She’d understand that part better than most. “Are you familiar with the Diaspora Colonies?”
“Vaguely.” She shrugged. “Mostly independent colony ships, left Earth on their own dime. Majority of them never bothered to file accurate destination records, from what I remember.”
“That’s because most of them wanted nothing more than to get as far away from Earth as they could possibly get,” Mattan filled her in. “We’ve located a few over the last century or so, but most of them just vanished. Probably dead. Of the ones we do know of, two are in the no-man’s sky between Hayden and the Alliance.”
Sorilla snorted. “Surprised they weren’t annihilated by the Ross, in that case.”
“For whatever reason, their worlds didn’t interest the Ross,” Mattan shrugged.
What did interest the Ross was a long-standing mystery, but he was all too aware that the enigmatic grey aliens were as like to skip a dozen populated worlds on their way to what did interest them as they were to do anything else. Figuring out the inner workings of what passed for Ross’El minds was a fulltime occupation among xeno-psychology specialists in SOLCOM now.
“Since we’re looking to team up with the Alliance, I suppose one of them is causing trouble?” Sorilla asked, irritated.
Teaming up with the Alliance was one thing, but she didn’t much feel like drawing down on other humans in the process. It sounded like political bullshit to her.
“Somewhat,” the general said. “Frankly, if that were all, I doubt the Alliance would have bothered to contact us at all. The Diaspora Colonies we’re aware of are hardly in any shape to tangle with SOLCOM, let alone the Alliance, and there’s precious little we could do to stop the Alliance from stomping all over them if that was the goal.”
Sorilla nodded, understanding that well enough. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’s going on?”
Mattan chuckled. “You’re going to laugh when I tell you, then feel a little guilty for it.”
Sorilla groaned, closing her eyes. “That statement does not bode well.”
“Two of the earliest Diaspora ships were funded by religious groups,” the general said. “One from America, one from Europe. I don’t know how, other than perhaps God having a sense of humor, but they both must have gotten ahold of the same charts and picked the same destination…”
Sorilla nodded cautiously. It wasn’t actually as crazy as all that, given the limited number of potential Earth-type planets known to scientists early in the colonial movement. Hell, Hayden hadn’t even been on that list, and it was the most Earth-like anyone had located.
“You’d think they’d have checked with one another, just to avoid that sort of thing,” she noted.
“That would have been the sane thing to do, yes,” Mattan said with a roll of his eyes. “The trouble is, the American ship was funded by Christian fundamenta
lists and white supremacists, and the European ship got its money from extremist Muslims.”
Sorilla winced.
This was rapidly sounding like a comedy of errors that had no possible outcome beyond the tragic.
“Who the hell thought it was a good idea to let groups like that loose in space?” she asked, mostly rhetorically.
“I suppose it seemed ideal at the time,” Mattan said with a dry laugh. “Some of the worst extremists in their respective nations wanting to leave? It wouldn’t surprise me if we found that a big chunk of their funding came from people who just wanted to see them go.”
“God damn short-term thinking,” Sorilla swore.
“Yeah, well, welcome to the human race,” the general told her. “Where have you been for the last few thousand years?”
“They picked the same planet to colonize?” she asked painfully, almost not wanting to know the answer.
“I wish. They’d probably have long since offed each other if that were the situation,” Mattan sighed. “No, they picked two planets in nearby systems. That was the reason they both went in that direction. There was a cluster of potential planets all within a few light years of one another.”
That made sense to Sorilla. At least it would allow them to more easily shift to a secondary world if the primary wasn’t fit.
“Still not seeing the problem,” she admitted. “There’s no way either group could possibly have interstellar capability at this point.”
“True,” the general said, “or it would be if the Alliance hadn’t annexed those worlds and moved in.”
Sorilla laughed involuntarily, then immediately grimaced and cursed.
“Fuck.”
Mattan nodded. “It gets worse.”
“How the hell can it get worse than two xenophobic Earth cultures being annexed by the Alliance while we’re trying to make peace with them?” she asked, unbelieving.
She honestly didn’t know which side would be more up in arms over it if it got out. Humans because the Alliance had invaded more human-controlled worlds, whether they were actually connected to SOLCOM or not, or the Alliance once either of those two groups started really digging into their repertoire of atrocity. She could see why SOLCOM and the general thought this was a priority situation. It was a ticking time bomb that could easily blow up in everyone’s face.