The End of All Things: The Fourth Instalment

by John Scalzi

  I used my BrainPal to turn on the wall monitor in the conference room. The image of a small reddish planet popped up. “Sedna,” I repeated. “It had one of the Colonial Union’s oldest maintained science bases. We used it for deep field astronomy and for planetary science; Sedna’s in a good place to observe Earth’s entire system and the orbital dynamics therein.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Egan said.

  “The last couple of decades it’s been largely dormant,” I said. “It’s had a basically caretaker staff of three or four scientists on a month-on, month-off basis, mostly to monitor some very long-term observations undertaken there, and to run the maintenance robots.” I popped up a map of the base on the monitor. “But the relevant thing here is that during its heyday, over a century ago, the base was far more active. At its peak of activity there were more than a thousand people there.”

  “How do you know about it?” Hart Schmidt asked me.

  “Well, and I’m not proud of this, back in the day I worked in the CDF’s research and development arm, and there was a staff member I thought was a real asshole,” I said. “I had him transferred there.”

  “Nice,” Rigney said.

  “He wasn’t the only asshole in that scenario, I realize that now,” I allowed.

  Egan pointed to the base map. “We don’t have a caretaker staff there anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “After Earth broke off formal ties with the Colonial Union in the wake of the Perry incident—” and here I allowed myself a small smile at the idea of my old friend precipitating the greatest political crisis the Colonial Union had ever had “—we abandoned the base. Partly for political reasons, since we didn’t want the Earth to feel like we were lurking on their frontier. Partly because of economics.”

  “So, a large, recently abandoned base, dead square in our blind spot,” Rigney said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s not the only large, recently abandoned base that the Colonial Union or the CDF has, or that’s out there generally. I’ll create a list of sites we should survey. But if I were going to lay my money down on a site, it would be this one. We should check that out right away. Discreetly, obviously.”

  “Well, are you busy?”

  “Yes, he is,” Abumwe said. “I have another immediate task for him. I need him on Earth, right away.”

  Rigney turned to Abumwe. “And you were going to tell us about this when, exactly?”

  “I just told you,” Abumwe said. “Prior to this I have been babysitting nine representatives, getting them to agree to our terms.”

  “How is that going?” Egan asked.

  “As well as can be expected. The representative from Huckleberry is complaining, but the representative from Huckleberry is a complainer. The others see the opportunity here and are working on him. We’ll have an agreement on time.”

  “Good.”

  “And you will need agreement on your end, Colonel.”

  Egan and Rigney looked at each other. “It’s in process,” Egan said.

  “That doesn’t sound as optimistic as I would like.”

  “It will get done. Right now the question is how messy it will have to be.”

  “I’d still like to talk about Lieutenant Wilson going to Earth,” Rigney said. “We can’t send a ship there. Not now.”

  “I have a solution to that,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of,” Rigney said.

  “It involves a bit of technology that we sort of abandoned a few years ago.”

  “Abandoned why?”

  “When we used it there was a slight tendency to … explode.”

  “Explode?” Hart said.

  “Well, ‘explode’ maybe isn’t the most accurate term. What actually happens is much more interesting.”

  * * *

  As I floated over the surface of the planet Earth, a thought came to me: One day I’d like to visit this planet without having to toss myself down its atmosphere.

  The small wireframe sled I was currently sitting in was the size of a small buggy and entirely open to space; only my combat suit and a small supply of oxygen kept the vacuum of space from eating me whole. Behind me in the buggy was an experimental skip drive, one designed to take advantage of the relative flatness of space at the Lagrange points of two massive objects, say, a star and its planet, or a planet and its moon. The good news is that the theory behind this new type of skip drive checked out, which meant that, if this new drive was reliable, it could revolutionize how space travel happened.

  The bad news was that despite our best efforts, it was only 98 percent reliable for masses under five tons, and the failure rate went up in chartable curve from there. For a ship the size of a standard Colonial frigate, the success rate dropped to a very unsettling seven percent. When the drive failed, the ship exploded. And when I say “exploded” I mean “interacted catastrophically with the topography of space/time in ways we’re not entirely able to explain,” but “explode” gets the gist of it, particularly with regard to what would happen to a human caught in it.

  We could never fix it, and the Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense Forces had a strange aversion to having their ships potentially explode 93 times out of a hundred. Eventually the research was abandoned.

  But there were still the small, very light vehicles we created with the prototype engines attached to them, currently stored in a warehouse module of Phoenix Station. They would be the perfect way for me to get to Earth both in a hurry—because I would only have to travel as far as the nearest Lagrange point—and undetected, because the sled was very small and could skip very close to the atmosphere of the planet. It was, in short, perfect for the mission.

  As long as I didn’t explode.

  I did not explode.

  Which, frankly, was a relief. It meant the hard part of my trip was over. Now all I had to do was let gravity do its work and just fall to the ground.

  I unlatched myself from the sled and pushed off, getting distance from it. Its fate would be to burn up in the upper atmosphere. I did not want to be there when it went.

  My own trip through the atmosphere was thankfully uneventful. My nanobotic shield held perfectly well, the turbulence was perfectly tolerable, and my descent through the lower reaches of the atmosphere was smartly managed by my parachute, which landed me, light as a feather, in a small park on the Virginia-side banks of the Potomac River, outside of Washington, D.C. As the nanobots that comprised my parachute disassociated into dust, I reflected on the fact that I had become a little jaded about falling to the surface of a planet from space.

  This is my life now, I thought. I accessed my BrainPal to confirm the local time, which was 3:20 A.M. on a Sunday, and to confirm that I had landed near where I wanted to be: Alexandria, Virginia, in the USA.

  “Wow,” someone said, and I looked around. There was an older man, lying on a bench. He was either homeless or just liked sleeping in the park.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You just fell from the sky,” he said.

  “Brother, you don’t know the half of it,” I replied.

  * * *

  I came across who I was looking for several hours later, having brunch at an Alexandria restaurant, not too far from her home, which I did not visit even though I knew where it was, because, come on, that’s rude.

  She was sitting by herself on the restaurant patio, at a two-seater table near the patio’s sidewalk railing. She had a Bloody Mary in one hand and a pencil in the other. The former she was drinking; the latter she was applying to a crossword puzzle. She was wearing a hat to block the sun and sunglasses, I suspect, to avoid eye contact with creeps.

  I walked up and glanced down at the crossword puzzle. “Thirty-two down is ‘paprika,’” I said.

  “I knew that,” she said, not looking up at me. “But thanks anyway, random annoying dude. Also, if you think butting into my crossword puzzle is a good way to hit on me, you should probably just keep walking. In fact, you should just k
eep walking anyway.”

  “That’s a fine ‘hello’ to someone who’s saved your life,” I said. “Twice.”

  She looked up. Her mouth dropped open. Her Bloody Mary slipped out of her hand and hit the ground.

  “Shit!” she said, flustered, at the spilled drink.

  “That’s better,” I said. “Hello, Danielle.”

  Danielle Lowen, of the United States State Department, stood up as a waiter came to pick up her spilled drink. She looked me over. “It’s really you,” she said.

  “Yes it is.”

  She looked me over again. “You’re not green,” she said.

  I smiled. “I thought it might make me stick out.”

  “It’s throwing me,” she said. “Now that I see you without it I recognize how disgustingly young you look. I hate you.”

  “I assure you it’s only temporary.”

  “Will you be trying purple next?”

  “I think I’ll stick with the classics.”

  The waiter had finished cleaning up the spilled drink and broken glass and ducked away. Danielle looked at me. “Well? Are you going to sit down or are we going to keep standing here awkwardly?”

  “I’m waiting for an invitation,” I said. “When we left off, I was told to keep walking.”

  Danielle grinned. “Harry Wilson, will you have brunch with me?”

  “I would be delighted,” I said, and stepped over the railing. When I did Danielle came over to me and gave me a fierce hug, and a peck on the cheek.

  “Jesus, it’s good to see you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. We both took our seats.

  “Now tell me why you’re here,” she said, after we sat down.

  “You don’t think it’s just to see you?” I asked.

  “As much as I would like to, no,” she said. “It’s not like you live down the road.” She frowned for a moment. “How did you get here, anyway?”

  “It’s classified.”

  “I’m close enough to stab you with a fork.”

  “I used a very small, experimental craft.”

  “A flying saucer.”

  “More like a space dune buggy.”

  “A ‘space dune buggy’ doesn’t sound very safe.”

  “It’s perfectly safe, ninety-eight percent of the time.”

  “Where did you park it?”

  “I didn’t. It burned up in the upper atmosphere and I did a jump the rest of the way down.”

  “You and your jumps, Harry. There are easier ways to visit the planet Earth.”

  “At the moment there’s really not,” I said. “At least not for me.”

  The waiter returned with a new Bloody Mary for Danielle, and she ordered for the both of us. “I hope that’s all right,” she said, of the ordering.

  “You know this place better than I do.”

  “So you dropped in. Tell me why.”

  “I need you to get me in to speak to the U.S. secretary of state.”

  “You need to speak to my dad.”

  “Well, what I really need to do is speak to the entire United Nations,” I said. “But for the very short term I will settle for your father, yes.”

  “You couldn’t send a note?”

  “This isn’t really something I could have put into a note.”

  “Try it now.”

  “All right,” I said. “‘Dear Danielle Lowen: How are you? I am fine. The group that destroyed Earth Station and made it look like the Colonial Union did it is now planning to nuke the surface of your planet until it glows, and frame the Conclave for it. Hope you are well. Looking forward to rescuing you in space again soon. Your friend, Harry Wilson.’”

  Danielle was quiet for a moment. “All right, you have a point,” she said, finally.

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s accurate?” she asked. “The part about Equilibrium planning to use nuclear weapons against the Earth.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have all the documents and data with me.” I tapped my temple to indicate my BrainPal. “The information is not yet one hundred percent confirmed but it comes from sources we can verify.”

  “Why does Equilibrium want to do that?”

  “You’re going to hate the reason, I assure you.”

  “Of course I’m going to hate it. There’s no good reason to nuke an entire planet.”

  “It’s not really about Earth,” I said. “Equilibrium is pitting the Colonial Union and the Conclave against each other in the hope they’ll destroy each other.”

  “I thought they had a different plan for that. One that didn’t involve the Earth.”

  “They did, but then we found out about it. So they changed their plans to include you.”

  “They’ll kill billions here just to make the two of you fight up there.”

  “That’s about right.”

  Danielle glowered. “This is a fucked-up universe we live in, Harry.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for as long as I’ve known you.”

  “Yes, but before this I could still believe you might be wrong about it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Danielle said. “It might be the Colonial Union’s fault. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is, if you go back far enough.”

  “You’re not entirely wrong.”

  “No, I’m not. The Colonial Union—”

  I held up a hand. Danielle paused. “You know you lecture me about the Colonial Union every time I see you,” I said. “And every time I see you I tell you that you and I don’t really disagree. If it’s okay with you, I’d be fine with just having this bit of our interaction tabled as read, so we can move on to other things.”

  Danielle looked at me sourly. “I like ranting about the Colonial Union.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “By all means please continue.”

  “It’s too late for that,” she said. “The moment’s gone.”

  Our food arrived.

  “Now I’m not hungry,” Danielle said.

  “It’s difficult to keep an appetite in the face of global nuclear extinction,” I said. I carved into a waffle.

  “You don’t seem to be having a problem,” Danielle observed, dryly. “But then it’s not your planet.”

  “It certainly is my planet,” I said. “I’m from Indiana.”

  “But not recently.”

  “Recently enough, I assure you,” I said. I took a bite of waffle, chewed it, and swallowed it. “The reason I can eat is because I have a plan.”

  “You have a plan.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “And you thought up this plan on your own, did you.”

  “No, Ambassador Abumwe thought it up,” I said. “Most of it. I helped in the margins.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way—”

  “This is gonna be good,” I said, and took a drink of my orange juice.

  “—but the fact it’s Abumwe who thought up this plan is more reassuring than if you thought it up.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “She’s a grown-up.”

  “Yes,” Danielle said. “Whereas you look like my kid brother.”

  “Despite the fact I’m older than you and Abumwe combined.”

  “Scratch that. You look like my kid brother’s distractingly hot college roommate. And please stop telling me you’re old enough to be my grandfather. The cognitive dissonance really ruins it for me.”

  I grinned. “You seem to be processing the end of days pretty well,” I said.

  “Do I?” Danielle said. “Yes, well. Rest assured that the moment the flirty banter stops I’m going to be well and truly losing my shit, Harry.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Remember, we have a plan from a responsible grown-up.”

  “And what does this plan entail, Harry?”

  “Several small things, and one very big thing,” I said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “The Earth trusting the Colonial Union.”

>   “To do what?”

  “To save you.”

  “Ah,” Danielle said. “I can already tell you that’s going to be a tough sell.”

  “And now you know why I’m here instead of sending you a note. And why I’m talking to you first.”

  “Harry,” Danielle cautioned. “Just because we like each other as people doesn’t mean that my father or anyone else will listen to you.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “But us liking each other, and me saving your life twice, is enough to get my foot in the door. And then the plan will take over.”

  “It better be a good plan, Harry.”

  “It is. I promise.”

  “What else are you going to need besides us trusting you?”

  “One of your ships,” I said. “And, if you’re not too busy, you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because we’re going to go talk to Hafte Sorvalh, the head of the Conclave. You’ve been head of a mission to the Conclave very recently. If we get an agreement down here, we have things to talk about to her up there.”

  “The Conclave’s officially not talking to you right now.”

  “Yes, I know. We have a plan.”

  “Abumwe again?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” Danielle said, and got out her PDA.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling Dad.”

  “Let me finish brunch first.”

  “I thought this was a matter of some urgency, Harry.”

  “It is,” I said. “But I fell from the sky today. I could use a couple of waffles.”

  PART THREE

  “Well, and here we are again,” Hafte Sorvalh said, to the three of us. “And how completely unsurprising this seems to me.”

  Sorvalh’s audience consisted of Ambassador Abumwe, Ambassador Lowen, and me, as their joint underling for the meeting. Sorvalh had her own underling with her, if one could genuinely call Vnac Oi, the head of intelligence for all of the Conclave, an underling. Sorvalh and the ambassadors were sitting; Oi and I, standing. I was doing a lot of standing in meetings recently.

  We five were in her private study at Conclave headquarters. On the other side of the door, literally and figuratively, were ambassadorial staff and experts and advisors, from Earth, from the Colonial Union, and from the Conclave. If one was quiet, one could feel their combined howling frustration at not being in the room at the moment.