by Tim Andersen
“You know why. Trexel’s the enemy, right? He’s the one who was spying on you and Smith, who sent Crispin and me to spy on you.”
She shook her head. “No Goshan, you don’t understand. Trexel’s our boss. So maybe I don’t like him. I think he’s a paranoid son-of-a-bitch actually, but he’s not the enemy. I hated Lars because he was a slime ball who pretended to be a nice guy. When I found out that you were spying on us for Trexel, I thought you were in league with Lars.”
“But I wasn’t,” I said.
“I know that now. I’ve had time to think about it. Tolan told me about you and Trexel. He said that Trexel was very loyal to your family. I don’t blame you for helping him. Look I was angry, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you feel like you had to lie, and I’m sorry I made your mom think I was your girlfriend. So let’s make a deal. No more lying. We’re in this together from here on out.”
She reached out a hand, and I thought she wanted me to shake it. Instead she grabbed me and hugged me. I hugged her back tightly saying, “I’m sorry too.” Right now she was my only lifeline in this storm.
When we parted, I noticed her cheeks were flushed. So were mine. We both looked away from each other, feeling awkward. She looked back at me. “So,” she said, “you told Trexel everything? About the Amidans being humans, everything we learned about the Sylvanians. All of it?”
I nodded. “He told me that there was no distress call received from Sylvania, and that they didn’t know about the attack there.” I looked at my shoes. “It hardly matters much now.”
She shook her head. “No, it does matter. The Abbot would not have made such a big deal about it if it wasn’t important.”
“Well, the Troll attack hadn’t happened yet then,” I said.
“Do you honestly think that the Amidans didn’t know about that?”
“If they knew, why didn’t they tell us?” I said. “Why go on about some stupid little skirmish in the colonies? Who really cares if Sylvania wants to take over some insignificant settlements on Atlantis and Polaris?”
“If they didn’t tell us, it must have been part of their plan, Goshan,” she said.
“Oh their miraculous plan,” I said. “It keeps getting better all the time. First they fail to warn us about the Sylvanians in time to do anything about it. Tell us that the distress call is going out when it’s not, and they totally miss telling us that the Trolls are about to invade our homeworld. That sounds like a plan alright.”
“I know that it doesn’t make sense to us,” she said. “But---”
“What? Are you going to tell me that the Amidans work in mysterious ways their wonders to perform? Save it for church.” I huffed and faced the window where we were approaching a small wheel ship.
Lika became very quiet. Slowly, she said, “your mother asked me why we should trust the Amidans.”
“Yeah, you said it was because your Prophet Smith said so,” I said.
“Tolan’s no prophet, Goshan. He’s a very, very smart man, and he always has a good reason to do what he does. He never just reveals things, saying God or an angel told him. If he says something is true, he explains it with logic. So do you want to hear his reason for why we should trust the Amidans or not?”
As upset as I was, I was curious.
“We know that the Amidans are just shy of being all-powerful, don’t we?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Trust me; we know from our research that, for them, thinking makes it so. Anything they want to do, they can do.”
“Fine, they’re the almighty Amida,” I said.
“So if you don’t agree with an almighty power, what do you do?” she said.
“Find another almighty power?” I suggested.
“There isn’t one. At least, not one that we know about,” she said. “The Amidans are it.”
“Okay, I don’t know, what do you do?”
“Go along,” she said. “Surrender.”
“It makes you wonder what the point of disagreeing was in the first place,” I said.
“We all have the impulse to disagree sometimes even with the inevitable, but, if you can’t carry out any action that will get you what you want, then what’s the point? You just feel bad that you’re dissatisfied. Once you let go, once you go along, you’re happy no matter what happens to you.”
“Gee, so if the Amidans want to perform abdominal surgery on me without anesthetic I should just go along and be happy about it?” I said.
“Well, obviously you can only be so happy about vivisection,” she said, laughing. “But if that’s what they want to do, then that’s what’s going to happen, so you might as well get used to it. You just have to hope that they have your best interests at heart.”
“So that’s it?” I said. “That’s Smith’s great reason? The reason why we should put ourselves entirely within the Amdians care, even if they want to let the Trolls pulverize our planet into space dust?”
“More or less, Goshan,” she said. “You have to admit. It’s completely logical. I just hope that the Amidans don’t want us destroyed. They’ve said before that they want us to survive.”
“They’ve lied before too,” I said.
“They also said that they wanted us to figure things out for ourselves. What we do matters, but fighting them is a waste of time.”
“I see your point,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to argue with them though.”
The shuttle docked with the wheel ship, and the guards stood up.
We followed the guards through the hatch into the wheel ship. I was surprised that such a large ship was being used for this journey until we floated on board the central hub. The ship looked as if it was fifty years old, one of the first class of long-term ships to venture into interstellar space even. I wondered if this was a cruel joke but realized that the military probably needed all its ships at a time like this. Sparing a warship just to bring back Smith made me wonder what my mother thought was so important.
The small crew on board seemed very quiet around us. I had the feeling that they had been ordered not to communicate with us. This ostracism was probably unnecessary. Even if I told people what the military was planning, I doubt anyone would believe it coming out of my mouth. It was too insane to believe. I didn’t believe it, and I knew my mother was not above lying to me. It had to be a ruse.
We climbed down a ladder from the hub to the edge of the wheel. Gradually, I began to feel a weight as the wheel’s rotation simulated gravity. Because the ship was smaller than the modern variety, I began to feel queasy.
Our guards silently showed us to a room with two beds. Ships were cramped even when they were larger, so we had to share a room not much bigger than a large closet. Just having a private room was an unprecedented luxury, but it was more likely a security precaution than a perk for the Minister’s son. One of them handed us a package of pills and some water. All he said was, “I’d take those if I were you.” Then he and his companion took up posts outside our door and closed the hatch, which was windowless.
I looked at the pills, wondering what they were. Pretty soon though, I started to feel really sick and had to lie down. Lika, on the other hand, downed a couple pills with some water right away. “I think they’re motion sickness pills, Goshan,” she said, handing me three.
I took them and after only about five minutes the queasiness began to disappear. I also began to feel a bit drunk too. I sat down hard on the bunk. Everything was starting to spin this way and that. I thought we were executing the Pipe but realized it was just my vestibular system.
“Goshan,” said Lika, and then burst into a fit of laughter. “I think we were only supposed to take one a piece.” She picked up the package and pointed to the instructions. “I can’t read them. The words keep moving around.”
I somehow found this enormously funny and laughed too. I picked up the package, trying to focus on the letters with difficulty. It said “take one with water every six hours.” Be
low that it said, “do not operate heavy machinery. May cause drowsiness.” Lika had taken two, and I had taken three. I tried shaking my head to clear it, but it was no good. I felt like I’d had at least five or six drinks on an empty stomach.
Meanwhile, Lika was staggering around the floor. She seemed about to topple over when she fell into my lap. We looked at each other and her face became very serious, hungry even. I felt a burning sensation all down my lower body. She pushed me back and straddled me. “Lika, Lika,” I said. “You’re drunk, Lika.”
“So are you, so shut up,” she said. She bent down and kissed me. She began to tear at my shirt, and I began to pull at her pants. At that moment, I wanted nothing else, nothing else mattered but her. I wanted not just her body but her mind, her soul to be one with mine. It was a messy, tangled affair trying to undress her while at the same time cover her with kisses.
The ship shook. I thought it was the drug and kept going, yanking her clothes off while she pulled at mine. Then it shook again, much, much harder.
I sat up, and she slid off me. “Something hit us,” I said, feeling scared. We both stopped. I could hear an alarm sounding. The Captain came over the PA, “all hands battle stations, battle stations,” she said. The ship shook again, and I felt a lurch as if we were changing position and the rotation adjustment thrusters were having a hard time keeping the simulated gravity at 1-g.
“Ugh,” she said, “at the worst possible moment. We’re under attack.” She grabbed her clothes and started to put them back on as quickly as I had been taking them off. I put mine back on too. Fear and adrenaline had erased the effects of the drug, and sex was the last thing on my mind.
We opened the hatch and found our guards gone, alarms were blaring, red klaxons flashing. A large window showed the source of the attack, illuminated in the sun. It was a Troll ship, looking like a massive cockroach in space. It was tearing through our hull with small missiles. These would not penetrate the hull unless concentrated at a point, and our ship was taking evasive action till Pegasus drones arrived to dispatch the lone invader. I could also hear a pervasive buzzing sound that indicated that our Pipe magnets were spinning up. Large ships like this needed longer than the Drunker Seeker had, so it would take a minute to make a large enough Pipe.
Lika and I were glued to the window, watching as some drones arrived and attacked the Troll ship. I was sure that they would drive it off, considering that it was outnumbered, but it remained, facing a heavy bombardment. I did notice that it was taking no evasive action. It took the drone attack and didn’t move.
I noticed that a light was beginning to build on one of its projections and thought that maybe they were on fire. A fire in space would be devastating to high oxygen breathing creatures like the Trolls.
The light continued to grow, and then I thought it must be the sun glinting off some metallic surface. The sun was behind us after all.
The light became so bright that I had to shield my eyes. Abruptly, the light appeared as a beam and I realized that it was, in fact, a huge plasma disruptor. “Back in!” Lika shouted. We hurled ourselves into our room and swung the hatch closed, sealing us in airtight. I heard metal rending and melting as the gigantic beam sliced through the center of our hull. There was a hiss as air rushed out of the main corridor. Then a lurch that suggested that a piece of the ship had been severed completely. The rotation of the ship meant that the two halves would fly apart. Then an even harder acceleration hit like a blast front. We were both flung against the bulkhead, and I hit my head. The last thing I could see was Lika near me, fighting against the acceleration to reach me. Then everything began to turn, and I blacked out.
I was talking to Lincoln while he sat on his throne in his memorial. He was listening with rapt attention. I was explaining the assassination conspiracy to him. He was shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. Booth was such a magnificent actor too,” he said. “I saw him on the stage several times. He came from such a talented family. His father was the talk of the nation for a time.”
“It’s the person you least suspect, I suppose,” I said.
“You say that some theorists thought Stanton wanted to decapitate the leadership, and put Booth up to it?” he said.
“The Secretary of War was one of your enemies before your election in 1860,” I reminded him. “He often disagreed with you.”
“Bah!” he said. “If anyone wanted to stage a coup, it would be General McClellan. (Not that he had the chance.) But he insisted that I was corrupt and destroying the nation in his campaign. If he hadn’t been so incompetent in the early days before I replaced him, the war would have been over sooner.”
“Most historians think that the 1864 election---”
Someone cut me off. “Fenn, you useless lump, get up!”
My eyes snapped open, and Lincoln disappeared. Smith was looking at me with Lika standing nearby. I reached up and felt my head, but there was nothing there, no bruise, bump, or wound.
“The Amidans healed you, Goshan,” said Lika.
“Oh, how nice of them,” I said, sitting up. “I guess they are good for something.”
“More than you, Fenn. You’ve been asleep for hours,” said Smith. “Lika thought you were comatose.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In the Abbey on the Mountain, Goshan,” said Lika. “Our ship completed the Pipe. We were the only survivors to make it here.”
“The only ones?”
“The crew were either sucked out into space or burned to a crisp,” said Smith. “The room you were in was an escape pod, and the Captain jettisoned it before the explosion. You were thrown through the Pipe. The Amidans say they found you amongst the wreckage.”
“An escape pod? My mother must have known,” I said.
“She saved your lives. She must be smarter than you, Fenn,” he said. “More likely than not, whoever tried to assassinate you thinks you’re dead.”
“It wasn’t an assassination attempt. It was a Troll ship, a coincidence.”
“A coincidence that a single Troll ship appeared in an apparent suicide mission, attacked the least capable wheel ship in the region of Earth orbit, and subsequently got blown to pieces? The wheel ship that you two just happened to be on? I think not,” he said. “You were targeted three times and escaped each time.” He held up his hand with three fingers. “If I believed in divine influence, I would say you had someone watching out for you up there.” He pointed to the ceiling of the cell. “But in reality people are looking out for you who are cleverer than you. Why we bother, I don’t know.”
It was so good to be alive, I ignored Smith’s insults which, I realized, tended to come when he was under stress. The assassination attempts on us must have shaken him. “Well, what do we do now?” I said. “Should we just pretend to be dead?”
“For the time being,” said Smith.
I remembered what my mother had said about trying to convince the PM to annihilate the Trolls. It had been hours, they said, since we had left, plenty of time for those ISBMs to find their marks. “What’s happened? Is Earth gone? Are the Trolls gone? What? Tell me!” I was standing, shouting. I could not bear not knowing.
“Sit down!” said Smith, pushing me back on the mat, where my head immediately began to spin. “Control yourself. Earth is not gone. The Trolls are not gone. Nothing has happened.”
“Oh,” I said, lying down. “Then there’s still time.”
“Things have been quiet on Earth since you left,” he said. “I know something important is happening,” he said, hitting his palm with his fist, “but we have no way of knowing what it is.”
“Have there been more Troll attacks?” I asked.
“That’s the odd aspect,” said Smith. “There haven’t. It’s not unusual for the Trolls to mull and deliberate, sometimes for years, over whether to attack. But when they decide to do it, there’s no more thought. It’s automatic. They attack and attack and attack until some other lengthy thought process completes
in their high command and then they stop. For them to attack once, then be forced into retreat and not come back almost immediately, is nothing short of bizarre.”
“Maybe our forces crippled them,” I suggested.
“Crippled them? What a silly thing to say. They’re not crippled,” he said. “It would take years of bloody combat before we even began to cripple their offensive capabilities. Short of anti-matting them all, there’s no way that’s happened.”
“Could we have? Anti-matted them?”
Smith shook his head. “If we had anti-matted them, it’d be all over the news, which I have been monitoring. They wouldn’t keep a triumph like that out of the broadcasts. No one would cry over it. The peon on the street would say ‘good riddance, serves em right’. No, they’ve just stopped, which means that they planned to stop all along.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If you knew anything about Trolls, Fenn, you wouldn’t need to ask. Look it up in that lovely book you brought along with you.” He picked up Practical Alien Communication and threw it onto my stomach.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Lika asked him.
“I don’t know,” said Smith. “I wasn’t expecting you to come back. Now that you’re stuck here, find something useful to do. Just stay on this side of the valley.”
“What about you?” I asked.
He stared at me for several seconds then said, “I need time to think---alone,” and walked out of the cell.
“Goshan,” said Lika, “Tolan’s been having a hard time with this. He was very upset when the Amidans brought us in.”
“How touching,” I said. “What do you think he's doing over there?”
“Tolan won’t tell me. He says that I wouldn’t understand it, but I think he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t understand more about what’s going on. He’s used to being ahead of everyone.”
“Embarrassed? The man’s as hard as a rock.”
She shook her head and sat down on the bed. “No, no, Tolan’s not like that. He’s sensitive.”
“If you say so,” I said. I did not want to argue with her. I had come to realize that she saw Tolan Smith like no one else.