by B. V. Larson
We drove off and left my folks behind. Etta seemed happier the further she got from home. It wasn’t that she didn’t like living with my folks, but a young person had ideas of their own by her age.
We took the sky-train to Central, flying all day and into the night. When we landed, I thoroughly expected Etta to stay with me—but she didn’t.
Instead, her mother met us at the station. Della had lost none of her looks or her odd charm. She gave us each a hug and led us out of the station.
“Daddy,” Etta said, “I’m going to spend some time with Mom. I want you to come look at my dorm room tomorrow though—you promise?”
“I promise and hope to die!”
A shadow flickered over her face, and I instantly regretted my choice of words. As I couldn’t take them back without making a bigger mess of things, I stood there and grinned like an idiot.
The women both seemed to buy this. I got another round of hugs, and they were gone.
Heaving a sigh, I looked around for a bar. Before I’d sipped my second beer, I was rudely interrupted.
“McGill!” shouted a small man with an impatient, bird-like step. It was none other than Primus Winslade. He marched toward me as if his feet were on fire. “There you are! Damn you man, can’t you keep your location settings on?”
“Oh, right…” I said, working my tapper. While I was off-duty, I didn’t like how much the computer embedded in my forearm spied on me, so I turned off every tracking option I could.
Winslade glared up at me. “So,” he said, “what do you know about all this?”
“About what, sir?”
He sighed. “I never know if you’re playing dumb or if you really are functionally retarded.”
“I suppose it’s a little of both, sir. But I honestly don’t know why I was ordered to come up here. What’s happened? A surprise assignment on some dumpster of a planet?”
“Nothing so mundane, I’m afraid. Come with me.”
I did so, and we soon reached the street. A hog specialist driver was waiting, and he was playing jockey on one of those government fliers with ass-injuring metal seats. We climbed in, and the specialist zoomed us straight toward the obsidian-black fortress known as Central.
We were breaking lots of laws along the way, I could tell that right off. Other air-traffic darted and dashed to the side, letting us pass. It was either that, or slam into us. A few drivers cursed and waved their middle fingers against their canopies as we soared by.
A frown was growing on my face as I thought all this over. Something serious seemed to be happening. Winslade had been Turov’s sidekick in the past, but these days he was a Primus and a hog. It seemed odd for him to be fetching me from the airport at all—but I decided against asking him about it. I’d find out what was going on eventually.
We landed on the roof. That was unusual, too. I hadn’t been up here for years. One time, I’d shot a Galactic on this roof… On another occasion, I’d participated in a rebellion of sorts, starting right here.
I shook my head and smiled at the memories.
“Are you drunk?” Winslade demanded.
“No sir—but I’d like to be.”
He made a snorting sound, and we got out of the car. The specialist zoomed off without a word, throwing grit in our faces.
“Damned hogs,” I complained.
“Careful. Have you forgotten where you are?”
“Not at all, sir. This is hog-Central. Now that we’re alone, can you tell me what the hell is happening?”
“You haven’t heard about the… artifact?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing at all? Even the local news is talking about it.”
“Uh…”
Suddenly, I thought about the bright object Etta and I had spotted earlier the night before. Craning my neck, I looked up into the darkening sky and peered to the south.
There it was. A bright, bright light. It was even bigger and brighter than it had been the night before. I was sure of that much.
It had to be a planet—didn’t it?
-3-
After staring for a time, I wasn’t so sure. I knew the planets in the Solar System pretty well by now. I could tell something wasn’t quite right with the heavens above us, the same way a sailor might learn to recognize a coastline or a brewing storm. Being an interstellar traveler built a natural interest in a man concerning astronomy.
“That’s no planet, is it?” I asked.
Winslade was standing at my side, staring up with me.
“No, it isn’t…” he said without his usual sarcastic tone. “It’s something… unknown.”
I didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at me. We were both staring up at that single point of white light which grew ever brighter in the darkening sky.
“How can it be unknown? We’ve got lidar and a network of optical—”
“I’ve heard a few details,” he said. “It’s metallic and assumed to be of artificial construction, as it’s unnaturally smooth and round. Most importantly, it’s hurtling toward Earth at about a million kilometers an hour.”
Still craning my neck back, I took a step forward. The gritty puff-crete roof of Central crunched under my boots.
“This is why I’ve been recalled to Central? What the hell does Turov think I can do about it?”
Winslade released a dismissive snort. “On that score I’m as baffled as you are. Do you recognize it?”
“At this range? It’s only a speck.”
“It will grow bigger soon as it draws near.”
I frowned and looked at him at last. “What do you mean? How far out is that thing?”
He sniffed and shrugged. “Twenty million klicks, I believe.”
“Twenty million…” I said, doing what limited math my mind was capable of. The object was already larger than Mars or Jupiter. Granted, they were both farther away, but…
“It must be the size of a planet,” I surmised.
“Yes. Something like that. We must go downstairs now. I’m being summoned.”
I saw his tapper glowing redly. That was why I kept mine as difficult as possible to locate. If people could find you easily, they tended to give you more things to do.
Mine began to glow red too, however, filling with urgent messages from my superiors. I didn’t bother to check. Instead, I headed to the roof access doors, passed security, and we walked into the elevators.
“Yes,” Winslade told his tapper. “Yes, yes—I’ve got him here right now. No, he seems as baffled as everyone else. Of course he might be lying, I’m not an idiot—sir.”
I ignored Winslade. I was thinking hard.
Going back over his statements in my mind, I could assume the object hadn’t answered any radio challenges from Earth. So, the spooks here at Central didn’t even know where it was from. It could be a ship, in which case it was the largest vessel I’d ever heard of, or just a chunk of flying metal.
The details of its origins and identity didn’t really matter if that thing struck Earth. An object like that, drilling its way through space without a care, would smash into my home planet like a bullet hitting a balloon.
It would destroy the world.
Who could have sent it? My mind conjured up a dozen suspects. The Rigellians, the Wur... Maybe even a pocket of rebel squids. Lots of local aliens hated Earth.
The elevator stopped and Winslade got off. I followed him. I didn’t bother to figure out what floor we were on. It was somewhere up in the five hundreds—brass territory.
He stopped in front of an ornate set of office doors. I saw the insignia of a praetor on the wall outside, and I knew it had to be Drusus’ office.
Drusus had once been the tribune of Legion Varus. But that had been a long time ago. These days Turov ran the outfit, and Drusus ran Central.
Winslade hesitated at the door, reaching up a hand to knock. He wasn’t moving fast enough for my taste, so I reached out and opened the door. I strode past Winslade into the vast chamber beyon
d.
The office was very large and mostly empty. A dozen steps away, Drusus and Turov faced one another over the praetor’s massive desk. Drusus was behind that desk, while Turov was in front of it, sitting in a steel chair.
Now, none of this was too surprising. In fact, the scene looked quite innocent at first—until I noticed that Turov’s right wrist was handcuffed to the chair, and the chair was gravity-bolted to the floor.
Hmm…
So, she was a prisoner, and she’d summoned me to Central…
Making the best of an unknown situation, my face lit up with a broad Georgia grin. I threw them both a salute, then stepped up to the praetor’s desk and offered him a hand to shake.
“Good to see you, sirs!” I boomed out.
“You too, McGill, I’m sure,” Drusus said, ignoring my hand. “Take a seat.”
There was a second steel chair, and the gravity bolt was clamped on that one, too. But I sat down on it anyway like it was a velvet recliner.
“Got here as fast as I could, sirs,” I said. “People are all snarled-up about this new light in the sky. You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you?”
They both looked at me carefully. Turov seemed sullen, irritated, and worried. Drusus seemed deadly serious.
“We think it might be a Mogwa ship, McGill,” Drusus told me.
“You don’t say…”
“Who else would have the technology to build something like that?” Turov snapped suddenly. “An artificial sphere roughly the size of our own Moon?”
“Uh… could be any number of alien types. Take the Wur, for example.”
Drusus shook his head. “Not likely. The Wur aren’t good with metal. It’s their primary weakness, remember?”
“That’s true…” I said, detecting the first trickle of sweat under my arms since leaving Georgia.
“What would you suggest next?” Drusus asked.
“Uh… the saurians? They’ve got plenty of metal to throw around.”
“True, but to my knowledge they’ve never built a ship. They rent them from the Galactics, like they’re supposed to. And before you mention our local ship-builders the Skrull, I’d ask you to get serious.”
“Yeah… They’re sneaky, but not really this kind of aggressive. You’re right. It’s obvious who’s behind this: Rigel.”
Drusus frowned while Turov rolled her eyes. Drusus rubbed at his chin. “That’s not absurd on the face of it. Rigel hates us, they have excellent ship-building capacities, and they might have the balls to pull a stunt like this.”
“Drusus,” Turov said. “The odds on that scenario are very long. Don’t let McGill distract you.”
Drusus flicked his eyes to her, then back to me. “Ever since we first detected this object, we’ve been tracking it and trying to communicate with it. The object has ignored us. It has no obvious means of propulsion, no weaponry in evidence—but it does move. It has been accelerating and changing course, in fact, as it approaches Earth.”
“Well, that’s good news!”
“How do you figure, McGill?”
“Maybe they’re just a new species coming to pay us a visit. They still might slow down and slide into orbit quietly. You should never pre-judge a houseguest, my mama always says.”
A smile tugged at Drusus’ face. “That’s a very optimistic attitude you have, McGill. Unfortunately, I can’t take chances like that. I have to know if this vessel is a threat to Earth or not.”
“Uh… it might be, of course. Have you gathered the fleet? Are you going to blast that thing before it gets any closer?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “We’re going to make an attempt to stop it. But I thought that in the interest of gathering all the facts I can before taking drastic action, I should talk to people who tend to be involved in unusual events around here.”
I glanced at Turov and her chained wrist. “I see… you figured the tribune here might know where this UFO came from?”
“That’s right. She’s actually been quite helpful. She suggested that you might have the answer we seek.”
Looking over at Galina in surprise, I saw her study the floor.
Right then, I knew the truth: She’d sold me out. She’d blamed me for this sudden threat out of the blue. Apparently, judging by her manacles, her gambit hadn’t been entirely successful.
Galina and I had what could only be described as a twisted relationship. In our personal lives, we’d become quite friendly. We frequently had sex when we were off-duty and sometimes even when we were on.
But that didn’t mean we were some kind of pair-bonded soul-mates. It was treacherous moments like this that proved the point with regularity.
Galina liked me. She might even love me a little bit—but she loved her career and her ambitions even more.
“I see…” I repeated, deciding two could play at the blame-game. “So, she mentioned that I’d recently been on an unsanctioned trip to some distant planets—is that it?”
The incident I was referring to had happened right before I’d shipped out to Storm World. On that occasion, I’d been killed then revived on Mogwa Prime. As an unfortunate by-product of that particular adventure, I’d ended up killing Xlur, our local provincial governor.
“Yes,” Drusus said. “If that ship up there is of Galactic origin, I can’t imagine a better reason for their visit than to follow up on whatever crimes you might have committed while visiting the Core Worlds.”
Nodding my head in Galina’s direction, I decided to spill the beans a little further.
“Did she happen to mention that she killed me and then had me revived on Mogwa Prime? That the whole trip was her idea?”
Galina’s head snapped up. First shock, then rage flashed over her face.
“Shut up, McGill,” she hissed. “No one wants to hear your lies!”
I lifted my tapper, which now displayed no less than thirty-one urgent messages from Galina herself. I hadn’t bothered to read any of them, but it demonstrated clearly that she was quite interested in what I had to say today.
“Seems like you were interested an hour ago,” I said calmly.
“Look,” Drusus said. “I don’t want to hear about any personal problems you two might have. But what’s this about Mogwa Prime? What did you do out there, McGill?”
My jaw worked for a second with my mouth hanging open. I hated when it did that.
“Uh…” I said. “Look, sir, let’s just say that me and Galactics don’t always see eye-to-eye. However—and this is the big thing—there’s no way this ship is coming out from Mogwa Prime for vengeance.”
“And why’s that?” Drusus asked.
“Because Sateekas is on my side, that’s why. He likes what I did. We discussed it at Storm World, and he considered my actions to be proof of loyalty on my part.”
Drusus blinked. That was a big tell. As much as he knew about this situation, or thought he did—he was out of his depth. We all knew it right then.
“Sateekas? The ex-admiral of the Battle Fleet? The Mogwa who rules this province today?”
“The very same, sir.”
“He knows about your unsanctioned journey? How?”
I told him briefly, in a highly edited form, how I’d been forced to interact with the Mogwa who was now our local governor while serving out at Storm World.
“So, you see sirs, we’ve got nothing to worry about. That ship isn’t a Mogwa vessel. It’s somebody else.”
“You can’t know that,” Galina said. She looked at Drusus. “You can’t risk Earth on the basis of one rogue centurion’s hunch.”
Drusus looked at each of us intently. He was thinking hard, I could tell. After all, life hadn’t dealt him the easiest hand of cards.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “I mean, I’m just giving you information. I can’t see how it would impact our current situation, other than to clarify—”
“That’s because you don’t think, James,” Galina said. “If I thought you’d come her
e and bring up that trip, I wouldn’t have called for you.”
“The big deal is this, McGill,” Drusus interrupted. “I’m trying to decide right now if Earth is going to deliver a first-strike against this approaching ship—if it indeed is a ship. Galina has been urging me toward caution. To support her case, she confessed to having interacted with the Galactics recently.”
“You mean interaction… like airmailing me naked out into the cosmos?”
“Now that those details have been unearthed, yes.”
“I see…”
And I did see. Drusus had to deal with this threat. But if he played it wrong, and it turned out this vessel was coming to arrest me, or Galina, or thousands of other humans, then attacking them first would widen our crimes and make us into rebels.
On the other hand, if he waited too long to take action, Earth might not survive at all.
Drusus paced for a few minutes while staring at his desk. There on his desktop the image of the alien sphere grew larger ever so slowly, like the movement of the minute-hand on an ancient clock.
“I recall, McGill, that you once told me your loyalties resided with Earth, your family and Legion Varus in that order. Do you still feel that way?”
“Sure do, sir.”
He nodded and paced some more.
I noted that Galina was looking less carefully made-up than usual. A drop of sweat fell from her hair.
“We have to do it,” Drusus announced at last. “We have to strike first, and strike hard.”
He released Galina and threw us both out of his office. When we were alone, she turned on me.
“James! This isn’t a game. You have no idea who is coming at us, and whether or not attacking that ship will trigger our doom. What if you’ve just killed us all?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes you can’t know the truth, Galina. You just have to take your best shot.”
Looking sick, she accompanied me to the elevators.
I wasn’t all that good at reading women, but she didn’t look like she was in any kind of a romantic mood to me. All hopes of a warm and fuzzy rekindling with her tonight were fading fast.
-4-
Galina wouldn’t look me in the eye when we rode down in the elevator. That was kind of a big deal, as elevator rides in Central took a long-ass time. The silence grew uncomfortable as hundreds of floors flashed by.