by Allen Steele
“Really?” Senator Rochelle tries to reinsert himself in the conversation. “Anything you care to share with us?”
Shaw frowns. “Not much to talk about,” he says, and for a moment his eyes meet Lee’s. “A roundup of dissidents who may be opposed to this mission. Simply a precaution.”
“A wise idea.” Rochelle quickly voices his approval. “I’m glad we were able to renew the Alien and Sedition Act in the last session. It only seemed prudent, given our current situation.”
The current situation. As always, the Republic is under constant siege by its enemies, both abroad and within. The Commonwealth of New England, which still maintains armed troops at the borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Pacifica, whose guerrilla army wages daily skirmishes with URS forces over disputed territory in the northern Sierra Nevada range. The European Commonwealth, which continues to enforce trade embargoes until the Republic agrees to remove its nukes from geostationary orbit. Meanwhile, alleged spies were being arrested every day, in cities and towns all over the country. Last night a high-school teacher was publicly hanged in Houston. One of her former students claimed that she was using a satphone to transmit information to France; although the accused repeatedly protested her innocence during her trial, and the satphone was never found, the student was the son of a prominent Liberty Party official, and therefore his word was beyond question. The teacher’s execution was carried out a few hours after the trial’s completion and shown live on Govnet.
The President acknowledges the senator with only a vague nod; for the moment, he’s disinterested in politics. He steps a little closer to the railing, his solemn eyes casually examining the gold braid on Lee’s epaulets. “We have something in common, Captain,” he quietly observes. “We’re both named after famous ancestors.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.” Lee continues to stare straight ahead. “Robert E. Lee was my great-grandfather, several generations removed.” Or at least, so he’s been told; in Virginia, nearly everyone whose last name is Lee presumes to be descended from the general who led the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Lee’s claim to family ancestry is no more nor less valid than anyone else’s.
“Just as I’m descended from Alexander Hamilton, yes.” The President reaches up to smooth a minute wrinkle on the left shoulder of Lee’s uniform. “I’m curious…is there anything that General Lee ever said that strikes a chord with you? Something that has carried you to this place?”
Warmth curls around Lee’s neck. Although the President doesn’t look directly at him, he feels the eyes of everyone else in the room. Behind the President, Shaw watches him silently, his gaze never leaving his face.
“Yes, sir, he did.” Lee’s mouth is dry. “‘Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.’”
President Conroy raises his eyes to meet Lee’s. For a few seconds that seem much longer he regards him with cool appraisal. A small vein pulses in his neck below his right ear; Lee finds himself watching it with an abstract sort of fascination.
Does he suspect? Has he learned of the conspiracy? Two days ago, Lee wrote a letter, addressed to both Elise and her father, which he stored in his desk’s memory. The desk was instructed not to release its contents until after 2400 hours tomorrow night, but someone—Elise, the senator, the ISA—might have decrypted it. If they did…
“‘Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness,’” the President says at last. “‘Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.’” He pauses. “Do you understand, Captain?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“My great-grandfather…also several generations removed…wrote those words almost three hundred years ago, not long after this great country was founded in this very same room.” The President speaks as if Lee hasn’t said anything. “The conflicts were different then, but yet they remain much the same today. America is destined for greatness, and it’s our responsibility to achieve its destiny in the stars themselves. Out there, the Republic shall become ageless. Immortal.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
The President slowly nods. “You’re doing a great service to this country, Captain. For this, the Republic owes its gratitude.” His left hand moves from behind his back, extends across the railing. “God bless you, son. Good luck.”
Lee has a sudden impulse to spit in his face. No one could have stopped him, not even the soldier standing behind him. Instead, he clasps the President’s hand. His palm feels small and limp within his linen glove; Lee can’t resist the impulse to exert a little more pressure than usual.
“Thank you, sir,” he says. “I’ll do my best.”
The President winces, but smiles back at him, and it’s in that instant Lee’s last remaining doubts vanish. No more hesitation, no more second thoughts…
Tomorrow, he’s going to steal the Alabama.
HUNTSVILLE 7.4.70 / T-26.30.38
The first fiery red chrysanthemum has just exploded above the Tennessee River when Jorge Montero’s desk buzzes. Jorge doesn’t hear it at first; he’s out on the balcony with his family, enjoying the cool breeze that has come with the passing of the day, watching the skyrockets as they soar upward from the riverside several miles away. The delayed boom of the fireworks almost drowns out the phone from inside the house; it’s his son who notices it first.
“Call, Papa.” Carlos barely looks away as an orange blossom opens in the sky, its iridescent petals coruscating down around the holo of the single-star Republic flag looming above the modest Huntsville skyline.
Jorge grunts, pushes himself out of his chair. Rita gives him a little smile as he tromps past her to the glass-paneled door leading into the spare bedroom he’s converted into an office; Marie is curled up in her lap, head nestled against her mother’s shoulder. “Hurry back,” Rita murmurs. “You’re going to miss it.”
“It’ll take just a second.” Jorge had switched off the inside lights so that their eyes would become night-adapted; he almost tells the room to turn them back on again, but thinks better of it as he gropes his way through the dark office. A blue flash through the window illuminates his desk, making it a little easier to find, and he picks up the phone just as it buzzes a fourth time. “Hello?”
An anonymous voice. “Excuse me, is this the Jackson residence?”
Ice tickles the nape of his neck. “I’m sorry, no. You’ve got the wrong number.”
“My mistake. Sorry.” There’s a click, then the dial tone.
Jorge’s hand trembles as he puts down the phone. He stands alone in the office for a few moments, staring at nothing in particular, feeling his heart beat against his chest. Then he turns away from the desk, walks to the office door, and opens it. Light from the upstairs hallway causes him to squint; he deliberately shuts his eyes as he quickly moves across the hall to Carlos’s room. Fortunately, the kid has switched off the lights; Jorge goes to the window next to the bed and touches the stud that deopaques the glass.
Several coupes are parked on the street in front of their apartment house, yet none looks unfamiliar or out of place. As he watches, though, a dark blue midi cruises down St. Clair. It slows to a crawl as it comes within sight of his building; as it passes beneath a streetlamp he catches a brief glimpse of two men through the windshield. They’re peering up at his apartment.
The midi pulls over to the curb. Its rear lights flash, and its fan skirts billow as it settles to the ground, but the doors don’t open. The car remains still, as if its driver is waiting for something.
Jorge opaques the window, takes a deep breath. Then he hurries back across the hall to his office. Another pyrotechnic flash from across the city, followed several seconds later by distant thunder. “Hello, d
esk,” he says, careful to keep the office lights off. “I.D. Jorge, password totem pole.”
“Good evening, Jorge.” The wall behind the desk briefly displays the start-up screen before replacing it with a picture he had taken of Marie and Carlos in Big Spring Park one autumn afternoon last year. “Would you like to read your mail?”
“No.” Jorge opens the closet, pulls out the canvas duffel bag he packed nearly a month ago. “Locate all files prefixed zero-two and erase. Password one-nine-gamma.”
“Files located and erased.” A pause. “You have a phone subroutine attached to this command. Do you wish for me to activate it now?”
“Yes, please. Password two-nine-epsilon.” The desk will now place a call to the next person in the chain and repeat the same sequence of code words he had heard only a couple of minutes ago, alerting that individual in the same way he had been warned. Jorge hopes that the person who called him had been able to make a clean getaway, and that the next guy in line will receive the signal in time.
No time to worry about that now. “Make another call. Phonebook number twelve, password six-zero-six. Send voxcard in memory, attach encrypted file prefixed zero-three-zero. Then erase all data from memory. That’s all, desk.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment, Jorge drops the bag on top of the books and disks stacked on his desk and crosses the room to the balcony. His wife and children are still watching the fireworks. Rita looks around as he opens the door.
“It’s time,” he says quietly.
Her mouth falls open, and fear briefly crosses her face, then she quickly puts a clamp on her emotions before Marie notices. “All right, kids,” she says, swinging their daughter off her lap as she stands up, “that’s enough fireworks. Papa’s got a big surprise for you.”
“But I want to watch!” Marie wails. In the far distance, skyrockets sail upward two and three at a time, their crackling detonations overlapping one another: poom! poppa-poppa-poom! poom! “I don’t wanna go!”
“It’s almost over. Now we’re going out for ice cream.” Rita picks Marie up again, turns to Carlos. “C’mon, you too. We’re all going.”
Carlos looks away from the city, stares across the balcony at his father. Their eyes meet, and in that instant Jorge knows that the boy has guessed the truth. His son may only be fourteen, but he’s far more mature than his years; a few weeks ago, Jorge had told him everything—at least, everything that he needed to know—and warned him that this moment might come. Now Carlos simply nods. “Sure,” he says softly. “Sounds like fun.”
Jorge gives him a reassuring nod as he steps aside to let Rita carry Marie through the door. The little girl’s still fussing over missing the rest of the fireworks, but there’s no time to comfort her. He walks to the edge of the balcony, glances over the side. No one in the courtyard behind the apartment house, and his coupe is still parked in front of its recharger. “Seen anyone down there?” he murmurs as Carlos joins him at the railing.
“I haven’t really been looking. No, I don’t think so.” The teenager is shaking. “Papa, that call…”
“It’s begun.” It figures the ISA would pick this day for their next crackdown; the mass arrest of D.I.s—“dissident intellectuals,” to use a favorite Party expression—on the Fourth of July is sure to make every patriotic heart swell with pride. “We’ve got to hurry. Help Mama with Marie, will you?”
“Okay.” Carlos hesitates. “Can we take anything?”
“Only the clothes on your back. Sorry.” Carlos nods gravely, then heads for the balcony door. Jorge is about to follow him when an oval shadow passes across the balcony.
He looks up just in time to spot a floater moving past a floodlight on the cornice of the apartment house next door.
They’re already too late. The Prefects are closing in.
Rita has taken a moment to open the hall closet and wrap a light nylon jacket around Marie’s shoulders. His daughter is on her own two feet now, but as petulant as only a five-year-old can be, stamping angrily and insisting that she doesn’t want ice cream. His wife stares at Jorge as he comes out of the office, the canvas bag dangling from his left shoulder. Carlos emerges from his bedroom; he’s grabbed a vest from his room, and Jorge catches a glimpse of something as he hides it in his pocket. Probably his pad; Carlos never goes anywhere without it. Jorge hopes it doesn’t contain any incriminating information. Not that it matters; the court tends to reach a verdict first, then examine the evidence later, and then only if it cares to obey the letter of the Revised Constitution.
“All right.” Jorge tries hard to sound carefree, if only for Marie’s sake. “Let’s go get some ice cream.” Then he leads the way down the stairs to the entrance foyer.
The midi is still parked in front of the building, but now two men stand on the sidewalk in front of the vehicle. Neither wears the long grey coats of Prefects, yet they silently observe the Montero family as they walk down the front steps and turn toward the alley leading to the rear courtyard. Just as they’re about to walk around the side of the building, a police HV glides down the street.
“C’mon now. We don’t want to be late.” Jorge sweeps Marie off her feet, and the child giggles with delight as her daddy places her on his shoulders. “Ice cream…we’re gonna have ice cream…”
It’s at that moment the floodlights hit them, both in front and from behind.
“Stop!” The loudspeaker voice seems to come from all directions at once. “Don’t move!”
Jorge raises a hand against the white-hot glare. From her perch, Marie screams: “Papa…!”
“Raise your hands! Don’t try to run!”
Rita huddles against his side. “Jorge…!”
Beyond the harsh light, the silhouettes of men running toward them, their footsteps loud against the pavement. From behind, a siren whoops as the HV rushes into the alley.
“Papa! What are they doing…?”
Above him, the windows of the apartment house deopaque. Figures appear at the windows: their neighbors, whom Jorge knows by face but not by name, stare down at them. Then the windows go dark once more.
“Let me have her!” Rita claws at Marie’s jacket. “Let me have her!”
Marie howls in terror as Jorge lifts her off his shoulders. Her left foot lightly kicks him in the face, and he barely has time to deposit his daughter in his wife’s arms before someone grabs his wrist and twists it behind him.
“Wait a minute!” He instinctively yanks his arm free. “Hold on! My kids…!”
A baton slaps his stomach just above his kidney. A moment of exquisite pain as an electrical current passes through him, then all his muscles relax, and he collapses. The back of his head strikes the cracked asphalt, and now he lies in the driveway, paralyzed and dazed, watching with a distant sort of fascination as one of the men from the midi moves in on Carlos. The kid tries to punch him, but he misses; the scuffle moves beyond his range of vision, and all he sees are dark forms looming above him.
“Jorge…!”
One of the figures crouches closer, and the baton moves toward him again, the red light on its handle strobing against the night. Rita’s screaming, Marie’s screaming, and he can’t see or hear Carlos anymore.
The baton touches the side of his neck, and he plummets into black silence.
URSS ALABAMA 7.4.70 / T-24.01.00
She can’t see the stars. The spotlights arrayed along the open trusswork of the dry dock are too bright, and the only thing beyond them is the matte black expanse of space. Even Earth itself is invisible; it’s somewhere below the long cylindrical boom of the ship’s primary structure, which stretches away until it meets the enormous drum of the main engine. A shame; there won’t be many more opportunities for her to be alone before launch, and she would like to see Earth one last time.
Dana Monroe hovers in front of the broad window of Deck H5, watching service pods and dockworkers in hardsuits as they move along the Alabama, making their inspections of the starship’s five-hundred-foot hull. The windo
w is situated on lowest deck of the hub module, just below the primary airlocks and docking ports, and it’s the only porthole that faces backward. All the other windows in the payload section, including those in the seven ring modules encircling the hub, offer only side views, and none look forward: the view would have been blocked by the main fuel tank and the vast cone of the Bussard ramscoop.
Yet even as she surveys the prelaunch operations, Dana knows she’s only killing time. As chief engineer, her list has a couple of hundred different duties—239, to be exact—she needs to perform in the next twenty-four hours, half of which have to be completed within the next twelve. Through her headset, she hears the mingled voices of her team murmuring to one another over the primary com channel. For the time being, though, she holds in place, awaiting one single message that will lead her to one all-important job…
Dana switches her grip on the window rung from her left hand to her right. No sun-shadows on the dry dock scaffolds; that means Highgate’s equatorial orbit has taken it within Earth’s night once more. If she were doing EVA right now and on a tether outside the dock, she might be able to make out the Ursa Major constellation. If she couldn’t see the place she was about to leave, then at least she could see where she was going…
“Charlie Eagle, Charlie Eagle, this is Lima Oklahoma Ten. Do you copy?”
Dana gives her headset a gentle tap. “Charlie Eagle here. What’s up?”
Lima Oklahoma is Launch Operations, the pillbox-shaped superstructure outside the main bay; Lima Cherokee Ten is the call sign for the duty officer for this shift. “Dana, we just received a squib from Houston. A voxcard forwarded to you from someone in Pensacola, name of Arthur Monroe.”
Dana’s left eyebrow involuntarily tics. An old boyfriend once told her that it did that when she was nervous. “That’s my uncle. Sure, put it through…vox only, please.”
A moment passes, then she hears a reedy old man’s voice: “Dana, it’s your Uncle Art. I know you haven’t heard from me in a long while, but I just wanted to let you know how proud I am of you, and that your family is wishing you all the best of luck. You’re probably very busy just now, so you don’t need to call back if you don’t have time, but just remember that we love you very much…and that’s all I wanted to say. Oh, and I’m sending you a picture to take with you. Goodbye, and may God be with you.”