by Webb, Nick
“No. No! After that!”
Her face was … crazed. Like she was a woman possessed. What the hell was going on?
“The iridium?”
“Yes! The iridium! God, Pike, have you known this whole damn time?”
“That’s what flagged Dawn’s attention to that drone heading towards Earth. She noticed that there were discrepancies in the amounts of declared metal produced on Vesta, and the amounts that actually showed up after shipment. She dug deeper and saw that it was usually iridium going missing. She tracked it to that ship, and discovered it was a drone piloting it, and so off we went because she had this … feeling he was going to … do something awful.”
“Oh my God.” She held her head in her hands. “He was right.”
“Who?”
She couldn’t tell him about her secret weapons lab. That would not go over well with Pike.
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that we find out exactly how much went missing, and more importantly, where the hell it all is.”
He studied her face. “I get the feeling there’s an or else in there somewhere….”
She stood up and started walking towards the door. “Or else … hell, Pike, do I need to actually say it? Or else we’re all dead.”
Her comm unit buzzed while they were halfway to the bridge. “Admiral?”
“Yes, Larsen?”
“I have a call for you from Nhean. He says it’s urgent.”
Her footsteps quickened. “Patch him through.”
She was just rounding the last turn to the bridge, boots clanging as she hurried up the metal steps, when Nhean’s voice filtered through the comm unit: “I’ve found your missing rovers. The ones you lost on Mercury.”
One thing after another, she thought. Nhean had only just reported the missing mining rovers a few days ago. “Oh?” Her brows rose and her footsteps slowed again. “That’s good.”
“Not really.” His voice was unusually tense. “You’re not going to like where I found them.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mars
Carina Station
Koh Rong
Data Center
“So.” Ka'sagra was as serene as always, a gentle smile on her alien lips. “I’ve admired your restraint in the past days.”
“Have you.” Tel’rabim’s face was a mask. An empty room stretched behind him in the video feed. No windows. No landmarks.
“Yes.” Ka'sagra's smile widened. She spread her hands, palm up. “You’re truly learning mercy, after all these years. The virtues of—”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood to listen to one of your sermons.” Tel’rabim bit the words off. “Why did you call?”
“To hear about your plans, of course.” The High Priestess smiled. “When I heard about the attack, I feared the worst. Indeed, I heard a great many citizens were calling on you to end the human exile permanently. I thought you might, perhaps, strike at Mars…?”
“Oh? And where did you hear that from?” Tel’rabim had relaxed slightly.
“I may not be on Earth any longer, but—”
“The planet is no longer called ‘Earth.’”
There was a long pause, even longer than the time difference would allow. Nhean’s fingers clenched around the arms of the chair. The girl had provided the pathway for him, showing him frequencies and encryption markers. Now she knelt by his chair, as if afraid that the two Telestines could see through the screens and find her.
Nhean’s only regret in having her here was that she was seeing his anger. It was rare that he showed anything more than serenity to the outside world, but now—to hear his home planet renamed, and his extermination debated coolly—he wanted to yell his fury at the screens. He forced himself to say nothing.
Ka'sagra did not belabor the point. “I may not be on the planet, but I am hardly ignorant of what happens there.”
“Yes. You always seem to know a great deal about everything. How many spies do you have in parliament, I wonder?”
“I have no spies.” She soothed him as one might soothe a toddler. “I have only friends, those who speak to me because we share common concerns. Some are in parliament, yes.”
“Their names.” Tel’rabim spat out the demand. “Give me their names.”
“So you may label them as what?”
“Traitors!” The word was almost hysterical.
“This language is unbecoming of you, Tel’rabim. You know we are allies, you and I.”
“I know nothing of the sort.” Tel’rabim looked as if he very much wanted to end the call. “You undermine my every suggestion. You offer succor to our mortal enemies.”
“I have told you that the humans are necessary instruments of our ascension.”
“You have told me sentimental drivel.”
Nhean snorted. If Ka'sagra weren’t on the side of humanity, he would never have allied with her. The too-smooth platitudes and impossible reassurances she offered made his skin crawl. It appeared that on this point, at least, he and Tel’rabim were aligned. Even the girl was nodding in agreement with Tel’rabim’s words.
And Tel’rabim was clearly not in the mood to wait for more of Ka'sagra's peaceful sentiments. “Let me tell you about humans. They are fundamentally untrustworthy. It is what makes them so very difficult to exterminate.”
Ka'sagra said nothing. Her mouth was twisted.
“A human can be trusted to do only one thing: believe in elreghan te’ssar.”
Nhean paused the video. “What does that mean?” he murmured to the girl. It had been fairly easy to develop a translation mechanism after so many years spent translating by hand, but neither he nor his program understood that phrase. He paused the video feed.
She frowned for a moment. She gestured around them, indicating the room, and sighed deeply, giving a shrug. Then she pointed, flapped her hand to show the world far away, and smiled.
“’The grass is always greener?’” Nhean suggested.
She looked at him blankly.
“Hopefully that’s close enough. It tracks with what he was saying, anyway.” He switched the feed back on.
“And so you would exterminate them,” Ka'sagra said flatly. “You would kill them, simply because you find it untrustworthy that they yearn for their home back.”
“They would kill us in a moment if they had the chance!” Tel’rabim’s face flushed. “How can you possibly doubt that? How have you managed to turn so many to your cause, how do they still funnel you money and food that should go to our people? Humans should have been killed when we reached Earth, it was the only sensible option. You don’t leave an enemy alive. You don’t feed them. You don’t give them technology.”
“They are not our enemies,” Ka'sagra argued. “They are—”
“The necessary instruments of our ascension. Yes. I know. You have told me so many times I have the entire speech memorized. You have told me to stop building ships. You have told me to meet with their soldiers. What you should have done is let the stations fail. Let them die, one by one, out in the black. How do they move you to such pity? When did humanity become the pet cause of the Daughters of Ascension?”
“Who should know better than we what it is to lose their home?” Ka'sagra pointed out. “We fled. We lived in the ships as we crossed the great deep. It nearly killed us.”
“Which means we know very well how easy it would be to kill all of them. The fact that they are still alive—”
“Is a miracle.”
“Is due to your interference! If you hadn’t insisted on sending mechanics for their stations, or sending them food, medicine, water, they all would have been dead within months after their exile.”
Nhean made a strangled sound. Of the first stations, dozens had failed. The inhabitants had suffocated, or died in agony as the temperatures climbed out of control. Airlocks had vented without fail-safes coming online, and between the mold and the riots over food, it was a wonder any of the rest of them had survived, either. He’d heard
the bitter words spoken by the survivors of the Exodus: they must have hoped we would die.
He didn’t think anyone had really believed it, though. They all knew that the Telestines hardly cared about a single dead human, but it seemed too much trouble to get them all off Earth if they were only going to be killed anyway.
But had that been the plan all along? Offer a new home to funnel humanity off Earth, knowing they would take a slow death over a quick, certain one—there were still stories told of the firing squads used on the humans who would not accept exile—and then simply let them die, knowing that they did not have the technology to survive for long.
Though expensive, it was clever. With such similar mineral and nutrient needs, any attempt at poison might backfire on the Telestines, and it wasn’t out of the question that a manufactured illness might jump species. Not to mention, there was the issue of bodies. If the stations failed, however, they would be nice, floating mausoleums. Humanity gone, Earth preserved. No property damage. No protracted war required to end humanity. Just the slow, inevitable demise in inhospitable space.
Never had Nhean so violently wished someone dead.
“I strive for something greater,” Ka'sagra said simply. “You are afraid, Tel’rabim.”
“Of course I am afraid! And it is not some childish fear—I know that there is a very real possibility of them doing significant damage to us before I get the support in parliament to kill them all!”
“There are things for which it is worth enduring fear. To bring about the Ascension, dangerous paths must be walked.”
“No.” Tel’rabim managed a smile at last. “If this affected only you, I would let you do what you wished—but it does not, and I will no longer allow you to walk a path that endangers our entire species.”
“Thousands agree with me! They walk the path willingly!” There was a strange evasiveness in her manner. “Members of parliament. The rich, the poor. It is a truth all can see. They know the values of charity and kindness.”
“And I know those values will kill them. If you will not cease your work with the humans, I will have no choice but to consider you their ally and not our own.”
“Do what you will,” she said softly. “I am not afraid of your violence, as I am not afraid of theirs. All are working to bring about the Ascension. It is inevitable now.”
The feed switched off, and Nhean exchanged a glance with the girl. She was frowning, deeply troubled.
“We need her to believe it’s in doubt,” Nhean said finally. “If she believes nothing can stop it, she will not do anything extraordinary to help us. She will tell us not to worry, either.”
The girl was still frowning. Without even looking at him, she pushed herself up and made for the door, stopping only when a series of trills announced incoming alerts.
Nhean glanced over at the screens, half distracted as he rewound the tape of Ka'sagra and Tel’rabim. He was still thinking he had missed something when he realized what, exactly, he was seeing on the screens nearby.
His eyes focused on the image for a long moment before his fingers were moving frantically, jabbing at the comm buttons.
“Get me Walker.”
His eyes fixated on the image on the screen, and Schroeder’s cryptic information regarding the stolen mining rovers suddenly seemed relevant.
He sat, not moving, head still turned, until Larsen’s voice told him to go ahead.
“I’ve found your missing rovers. The ones you lost on Mercury.”
“Oh?” Walker sounded pleased. “That’s good.”
“Not really.” His fingers clenched on the arm of the chair. “You’re not going to like where I found them.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re heading for Mars, in twelve ships. Why, I don’t know, but you should know that—”
“Oh, my God.” Her voice was hollow. “We need to talk. All of us.” There was the sudden clang of footsteps; she was running now. “I know what he’s planning.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Mars
Carina Station
VFS Santa Maria
“What the hell is going on?” Pike slid into the conference room with a confused look at the guard outside. He’d been almost to the crew quarters when a junior officer came sprinting down the hallway in a panic, yelling for him to get back to Walker.
But there were no alarms. No one else seemed panicked.
And here was Walker, alone, cradling both elbows as she studied a grainy video projected on the wall. He hadn’t expected to see her again so soon. He let his breath out slowly.
Thankfully, she didn’t notice. She nodded to the video without looking at him. “I know what Tel’rabim is planning now.”
“Is Pike there?” Nhean’s voice filtered out of a comm unit on the table, making Pike jump.
“Yes.”
“What about Delaney?”
“I left him on the bridge.” Walker shook her head. Her eyes were locked on the video, not straying either to Pike or to the comm unit. “This won’t be the only part of Tel’rabim’s plan, and I need someone competent there when the rest hits, if we’re not done here yet.”
“So let us speak quickly: what is Tel’rabim planning?” Nhean sounded equal parts curious, and annoyed to have been waiting for Pike.
Pike could not make much sense of it either. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the image. Ships, an indeterminate number of them—ten? Eleven? No, twelve dots swimming into view in the picture. They weren’t large, he was fairly sure of that. He marked the trajectory and the coordinates at the bottom of the image. They would be heading for Mars, most likely.
“There are twelve mining rovers on those ships,” Walker said quietly. “What we must ask ourselves is, what did Tel’rabim use a rover for last time?”
Pike lifted his shoulders in a shrug—and then froze. “Oh my God. Io.”
“Exactly,” Walker said quietly.
“You think the missing material from Vesta is on those ships as bombs?” Nhean’s voice was carefully neutral.
“It fits.” Walker sounded offended at his tone. “I had my science team analyze it, and around fourteen bombs’ worth of material, we thought, went missing. And here are twelve rovers.”
Pike shook his head. “How can we be sure this isn’t coincidence?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said. “Besides. Think about it. Fourteen bombs’ worth of material. Two bombs just exploded on Earth. That leaves twelve. Now there are twelve mysterious shuttles with stolen mining rovers strapped to them, heading for our most populous settlement. You do the math.”
“He can’t mean to take out all of Mars, though.” It was, in many ways, a useless point. Nhean did not often speak that way.
But Pike shared the sentiment. Mars? All of Mars? Surely Tel’rabim couldn’t—
“No?” Walker challenged them both quietly. “Couldn’t he? Mars is our largest settlement. It’s the seat of our government. And it’s a statement of incredible power, to destroy an entire planet. Io was smaller, yes, but you could make Mars uninhabitable by spreading out the charges. My team tells me that the bombs get more powerful at higher pressures. But these mining rovers wouldn’t have to even dig that deep before they reach pressures far greater than what Sam Thorne dug down to on Io.”
Nhean said nothing for a long time. Pike was picturing the man with his chin sunk into his palm, eyes focused on something far away.
“Do you agree?” Walker said finally. Her eyes swept from the comm unit, to Pike. She began to pace around the table, hands linked behind her back.
“It’s a lot to spend on one settlement,” Pike said finally.
That point, oddly, seemed to mollify her. She nodded. “I thought so as well. But twelve rovers, twelve bombs. Why else would he do it?”
“It may not be him,” Nhean said quietly. “Those rovers were last seen before this on Vesta, in the possession of the Daughters of Ascension. I think … Tel’rabim�
�s Ceres attack may have either been his feint to distract us from the rovers being transferred or loaded at Vesta, or someone else knew about his plans to attack Ceres and used it as a distraction. Either way, Essa was played.”
Pike’s head swiveled to stare at the comm unit. “What?”
“I hate to defend Essa, but there was no way for him to know that.” She paused again, her head in a hand, thinking. “Tel’rabim’s trying to frame her again,” Walker said impatiently. “This will be the first part of his plan, he clearly didn’t get enough support from parliament to silence her, and so he’s shifted to implicating her in … terrorism. Bombing Earth. Bombing their own people, in addition to ours.”
A long pause, and then: “That’s quite possible. But I disagree.” Nhean’s voice was not flippant.
“You really think it could be Ka'sagra?”
“I think it would be unwise to trust any faction of Telestine society.” His answer was instant. “Tel’rabim demonstrated what we already should have known: that someone who spoke well of us, who seemed to support us, might also not be our ally. Ka'sagra now speaks well of us and seems to support us, and I will not let myself trust her any more than I trust him.”
There was a silence.
“And what would be her purpose in destroying Mars?” Walker asked finally. It was an empty courtesy, she clearly did not believe him in the slightest, but she was making the effort.
“Does it matter?” Nhean asked cryptically. “We need to stop it. Mobilize the fleet.”
“Or look for something in the opposite direction,” Walker hissed. “What if this is the distraction, what if this is how he lures us into the open and then attacks elsewhere?”
“It would take a dozen stations to match Mars for population, and we haven’t found anything else.” Nhean’s voice was patient. “We have to stop this.”
Walker shot Pike a look, but he could only shake his head. This was beyond him: surveillance programs and the tactics of Mars versus stations. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“If he takes the stations and leaves Mars, our population will all be grounded.” It was all he could think of.