Obviously there was a ship he wanted them to look at; she hadn’t meant for her question to be taken quite so literally. But there were a dozen other things they needed to be doing on a rare free Saturday, and none of them involved wandering around a commercial starship expo. “We have to pick Alexis up at 1500.”
“Which is two hours from now—plenty of time. Come on, it’s right up here.”
Past the next dividing wall sat a gleaming personal touring model starship. According to the scrolling placard, the design maximized internal living space above other considerations; a quick skim of the specs revealed the engines weren’t the fastest on the market and it was fitted with only a single utility laser.
Miriam had to concede it was attractively designed even on the outside, though. It was sleeker and more aerodynamic than military ships, with tasteful flair in the details.
David was already talking to the sales rep. She ran her gaze down the length of the hull a second time then went over to them.
“Are we allowed to take a peek inside? We won’t break anything. As Alliance military officers we’re both well acquainted with the workings of starships.”
“Certainly, sir. Take as long as you want—and make sure to notice the extensive refrigeration options. Top of the line!”
“Right.” David jerked his head toward the ramp. She rolled her eyes and followed him up.
He went straight for the cockpit, easing into the pilot’s chair and spinning it around in both directions.
How could she not smile? He was like a kid in a sweets shop, running his palms across the dash and studying the various controls as though they hid Christmas presents.
“Civilian ships are so straightforward, I could fly this in my sleep, with one arm restrained behind my back, blindfolded. Given a bit of instruction, I bet Alex could fly it without my help.”
Miriam dropped her arms atop the headrest and peered over his shoulder. “Or you could use the autopilot like normal people do.”
“No fun in that.” He bounced out of the chair and headed through the main cabin. “The sunken entertainment area is nice, no? They do a great job of creating the feel of separate spaces without wasting actual space.”
He gave the vaunted kitchen a once-over then got a devious glint in his eye. “We have to check out the bedroom—I just mean look at it. Sadly.”
She squelched a laugh as she followed him up the staircase. It deposited them in a master suite adorned in mahogany synthetic wood and subtly burnished nickel accents.
“I admit. This is nice.”
“Isn’t it, Miri?” He fell back on the bed and let out a gasp. “Join me. You must see this.”
Uncomfortable at the thought of acting so comfortable on a display ship in the middle of an expo showroom, she opted to perch on the edge of the bed and crane her neck to look up.
He grabbed her arm and unceremoniously yanked her down onto her back beside him. “See? Okay, it’s merely blue sky right now. But in space it will be stars. We can make love under the stars every night.”
“Every night? How very confident of you.”
“Every night.”
She squeezed his hand, then sighed. “It’s a lovely ship, David. But even if we were able to afford it, there’s no room in our life for this. We’re liable at any moment to face off-world assignments for months at a time. We’re required to be available on short notice for emergency deployment. And when at least one of us is stationed on Earth, we have to try to give Alexis as stable an environment as possible to grow up in.”
“I know, dushen’ka. But she won’t always be a little girl—before we realize it, she’ll be grown up and off on her own adventures. And we won’t always be military officers. We won’t always be beholden to the service. One day, our lives will be our own. When that day comes, will you sleep under the stars with me?”
He made it all sound so…possible. She smiled warmly. “Yes, David. When that day comes.”
She blinked out of her reverie when her comm burst to life. “Admiral, your daughter’s ship is arriving.”
34
EAS STALWART II
Space, Central Quadrant
* * *
Alex embraced her mother fully. She focused her mind on the details, on the physical sensations.
Warm skin beneath her uniform.
Firm hands conveying affection in their grasp.
The faint scent of lavender in her hair, since Alex’s childhood.
A smile drawing her features up, giving them life.
Heart beating solidly in her chest, giving her body life.
Real. This was real.
Caleb stood off to the side watching them, and she gave him his own, private smile.
Finally her mother broke the embrace to pull back to arms’ length. “I was worried when you got caught in the OTS attacks on Romane…” she glanced over at Caleb, who had adopted a casual pose against a nearby railing “…but I suppose you two are accustomed to looking out for yourselves. And now you’re here, with all your limbs intact.” She frowned. “But you can’t stay. This isn’t your fight.”
“No, it’s yours—and I’m here to give you a better chance of winning it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The prime minister has control of the Terrestrial Defense Grid, doesn’t she?”
Miriam’s expression turned guarded. “She might.”
“Are you betting on her not being willing to use it against you, betting on Admiral Grigg not being willing to use it against you, or betting your hull can withstand the assault?”
“I’m betting one of those three things will be true. Kennedy said the adiamene should hold.”
“May hold. She said it may hold—under fire from five, six, seven lasers. What if it’s more? I heard you’re planning to be the only target on the field.”
“It’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Alex, I—”
“Just hear me out for a minute, please? I’m not haranguing you for melodrama’s sake. I know how to modify your cloaking shield to protect you from any laser any array in the galaxy can throw at you.”
“How?” Her mother didn’t scoff or dismiss her with scorn, which meant rather a lot.
“Do you remember how I told you the Metigen cloaking mechanism didn’t merely hide Portal Prime, but shifted any ship that got too close into an alternate dimensional plane so they passed through the space without ever encountering the planet?”
Miriam nodded cautiously.
“At the time, the algorithms they used to accomplish the shift were beyond me, but I saved a record of them. I also wasn’t a Prevo then. In our exploration of the portal network we’ve seen a lot of uses of extra dimensions, and I’ve…gained a greater understanding of the way the fabric of space works.”
I’ve felt it in my bones. I’ve drowned in it. I’ve become it.
She blinked away a momentary surge of dizziness. “I’ve spent the last day studying the algorithms the Metigens used, and I now understand how they work. More importantly, I can replicate them.”
“You can…are you telling me you can create a field which will shift physical objects out of our physical dimensions?”
“Yep. I am.”
“Can you see more than three dimensions, then?”
“Sort of. Not exactly. I mean I have, but it’s more akin to I…understand where they are.”
Miriam started pacing, absently stroking her jaw. “So you’re saying if a laser from the Terrestrial Defense Grid, or any laser I imagine, were to get close to the ship, you could ‘divert’ it…but divert it where? If it kept going out the other side, the laser could still hit one of the other ships. I won’t endanger those with me to protect myself.”
Damn her mother’s heroic streak for making the unimaginable harder.
What if we adjust the equations like…so?
Ohhh. You’re right, Valkyrie, I see how cutting short the final reflection after
the inversion at the end could work.
“Well, yes, that’s how it worked on Portal Prime. But…I don’t have to let the laser come back. The rift can simply swallow it.”
“Like it fell into a black hole?”
‘Technically, scientists have as yet been unable to determine—’
Alex made a face at the air, a substitute for the disembodied voice. “Excuse me, who are you?”
‘I’m Thomas. It is an honor and a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Alexis Solovy.’
She raised a questioning eyebrow at her mother.
“He’s my Artific—”
“Your Artificial. Yeah, I got that part from the speech patterns. You have an Artificial integrated into your ship?”
“I do. What of it?”
Alex’s hand came to her mouth. What of it? “Um…nothing of it. Nothing at all. So as both Thomas and I were saying, we still don’t know what’s on the other side of a black hole, but for practical purposes, sure, it’s a close enough analogy.”
“Is this an all-or-nothing, or an either-or? How will this dimensional rift field operate vis-à-vis the cloaking?”
Alex exhaled. She was starting to get an idea of what it was like to work for her mother. “In theory, you can toggle them each independently of the other. In practice, running both at the same time will require a metric fuckton of power, which I assume is more than you have available. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll work around the limitation.” Her mom stared at her. “Are you certain you can do this?”
“I really think I am.”
“All right. How long do you need?”
“A few hours.” Immediate goal achieved, she finally stopped to look around the bridge. Her jaw promptly fell open. “Wow, Mom. This might be the most gorgeous ship I’ve ever seen—except for mine, of course.”
Miriam shrugged, but she also beamed. “It gets the job done. Hopefully it’ll stay in one piece and I’ll get to keep it around for a while.”
Caleb watched Alex leave for the bowels of the ship with the Chief Engineering Officer. Part of him wanted to accompany her, but he’d be a distraction. She seemed to be in a good place, and solid engineering work almost always helped her get to a better one.
So instead he turned back to Miriam. “Mind if I ask what your plan is?”
She gave him a weighty shrug. “I can provide the Security Ministry more than enough evidence to bring charges against Winslow, but without support powerful enough to match her she’ll run roughshod over them. Same with the Assembly and its Ethics Committee. So I will get myself on the ground and level the charges in person and in public, where they can’t be ignored.”
“That’s a strategy, not a plan.”
She arched a daunting eyebrow at him.
“You’ve said it yourself. Winslow controls the Assembly, as well as a reasonable piece of the military and all the planetary defenses. She won’t let you get close enough.”
“If I can get past the Terrestrial Defense Grid, she’d be insane to start a firefight in the skies above or on the streets of London.”
“I suspect she will nevertheless do precisely that if it means she stops you. You have thousands of ships and tens of thousands of military personnel behind you and ready to follow your orders. Use them.”
Miriam sighed. “I am not going to show up with a fleet of warships and blast my way into the Assembly. I do and Winslow wins by default. This cannot be about superior firepower and bullying tactics—not in the final moves. I will not frighten the people into supporting me.”
Dammit, she was setting herself up in a fatal catch-22…but she was also probably right. Optics. He ran a hand through his hair. “Understood. Then you need a plan to get on the ground and into the Assembly without triggering a firefight. Am I understanding the goal correctly?”
“Caleb, what are you suggesting?”
“Is Richard onboard?”
She shook her head. “No, he’s still on Seneca dealing with the OTS cleanup. He tried to come anyway, but I threatened to reinstate his dishonorable discharge if he did.”
The woman was relentless. Much like her daughter. “What about Malcolm Jenner?”
“No, but he’ll reach the fleet inside an hour. I can get him here quickly if it’s required.”
Jenner didn’t care much for him—Caleb hadn’t necessarily formed a corresponding opinion one way or the other—but he suspected it had less to do with Alex and more to do with a clash between upstanding Marine values and intelligence black ops sensibilities. He also suspected Jenner would put any ill feelings aside and follow Miriam’s orders for the good of the mission.
“I recommend you do that. Have him transfer his prisoners off his ship and ready it for redeployment.” He patted his shoulder bag. “You’ll want a guard unit. But thanks to a couple of gifts from Mia, if Jenner can get us on the ground, we can sneak you right into the middle of the Assembly Chamber.”
“ ‘We?’ Caleb, I meant what I said to Alex—this is not your fight. As soon as she finishes her work, I expect you both to vacate this ship.”
He huffed a breath. “I understand what you’re saying. But the truth is this is everyone’s fight, more than even you know.”
She glared at him wearing a frustrated countenance so much like Alex’s he struggled to bury a laugh.
It was good he succeeded, as her expression continued to darken. “I am done with all of you hinting at some dire knowledge you think it’s not in my best interests to know for now. I am the arbiter of what I do and do not need to know, and this is something I am deciding I need to know. Alex is a bit busy saving my skin at present, so out with it.”
He ran a hand through his hair…again, he realized belatedly. He couldn’t go behind Alex’s back. Not now.
Baby, your mother just threatened to castrate me if I didn’t tell her what we learned in the portal network.
What, really?
Well, no, not explicitly, but I feel as if castration might have been implied in her glare.
Yeah, I could see that.
The thing is, I suspect she’s right. And I’m kind of done with secrets.
More needed to be said on that, he knew, but later would have to suffice.
Damn. Okay, go ahead. I’ll be up to face the aftermath as soon as I can. I didn’t intend for you to have to be the one to do this. Thank you.
Always.
He nodded solemnly. “Can we go somewhere private, where we can sit? This is going to take a little while.”
Alex burst into the conference room. She was sweaty, half-covered in grease and her hair was falling out of its knot. It reminded Caleb of how she’d looked for most of his first days on the Siyane. He smiled.
Miriam did not. “You didn’t think this was something I needed to be made aware of? Have you no faith in me at all?”
Alex groaned and collapsed against the wall. “It’s exactly because I do have faith in you that I didn’t want to tell you yet. You don’t need to be lectured about how important it is for us to stay on the path of freedom and liberty or whatever, or how humans had gone astray in some other past with disastrous results, because you already appreciate how important it is. You don’t need to be told this is important for the future of the multiverse universe, because for you it’s important for the future of people alive here today.
“You already believe, and you’re already giving everything for your belief—giving everything to ensure such a future comes to pass.”
There you are.
He packed away the last vestiges of lingering terror that everything might crumble at any minute in a raging pyre of madness and tears—his own. A cognizant, vigilant peace assumed residence in the vacancy.
Meanwhile, Miriam’s expression wavered between aggravation and fondness. “Well…thank you. But it doesn’t excuse the fact that you decided something which wasn’t yours to decide. I swear, you are the most bullheadedly stubborn person I have ever known.”
A
lex snorted.
Caleb watched on in amusement. Valkyrie had told him something this morning. She’d said it was Alex’s ‘bullheaded stubbornness,’ to use Miriam’s phrasing—and occasionally his own—which had, more than anything else, enabled her to beat the worst aspects of her addiction. She had simply refused to allow it to defeat her, under conditions that would have sent anyone lesser to a hospital or spiraling into a nightmare of torment.
It was a quality of character which could not be explained by neurology or captured in an algorithm, but its existence was proven by the results.
Alex pushed off the wall to flop into the chair next to him, tossing him a sloppy grin before regarding her mother with embellished exasperation. “Now. Can we please defer further discussions about the destiny of humanity until after you’ve won? Don’t you want to know if I made it work?”
35
EARTH
London
Earth Alliance Assembly
* * *
No. Impossible.
Jude would not commit suicide. He was too arrogant, too narcissistic to ever deprive the world of his genius. As he should be…have been.
The news had reached Pamela via her network of spies and double agents shortly after she departed Washington; it remained secret from the public for now.
He was murdered. It was the sole plausible explanation. Murdered by one of the Prevos while shackled and imprisoned.
So now they had crowned themselves judge, jury and executioner, eschewing trials or even the appearance of the rule of law.
Despots, dictators, devils as aspiring gods.
What began as the ultimate power play had now become intensely, painfully personal. Pamela would smash Romane into dust for this. She simply needed her military back to do it.
But Miriam Solovy had taken it from her. All this horror, all this conflict and destruction could be traced back to Miriam Solovy. Prevo-creator, Prevo-lover, a despot in her own right. The woman was in league with the IDCC, in league with the Federation, in league with everyone except the Alliance that had made her.
In the end, the extent of the woman’s machinations meant she may as well have killed Jude herself.
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