The Deftly Paradox

by Matthew D. White

  The Deftly Paradox

  By

  M. D. White

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Matthew D. White

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author.

  For HCEL

  Other Books by Matthew D. White:

  The Deftly Paradox

  The Mission:SRX series:

  101: Before Space Recon, a short story

  1: Confessions of the First War

  2. Ephemeral Solace

  3. Deep Unknown

  4. Commander’s Wrath

  http:/www.mdwhiteauthor.com/launchpad

  Introduction

  To say that the stories I write are invented in a stroke of genius wherein they leap fully-formed onto a page would be giving myself far too much credit. There is a great deal more tinkering, experimenting and self-reflection that finds its way into the productive flow that I am not able to anticipate nor counteract. Rather than allow such surprises to be a hindrance along the way towards a final product, I’ve found it useful to allow them to manifest in a controlled environment.

  Most of my stories have involved the fusion of a small number of disparate ideas, whether they be characters, plots, locations or something else entirely. Using this as a backdrop for the larger narrative, I’m able to place specific points along the way which I’d like to hit, and let the story guide itself as far as how I get there… Then I get to the end and realize I’ve given the same person three different last names and four ranks, but let’s not go there right now.

  The Deftly Paradox is one such product of the mental supercollider, successfully merging a plot from the spares pile, a few characters who have impressed me in real life along with on the page, and an inside joke between a beta reader and the author that has become the bane of my developmental editing… Oh, and a few brainstorming sessions with the harshest critics I am able to harass with my overly ambitious ideas. Suffice to say, I’ve enjoyed seeing The Deftly Paradox take shape and it is my singular wish that you find it equally as engaging to read the final product.

  V/R

  Matthew D. White

  1

  Sweat built on Senator Leary’s brow in the classically decorated antechamber of the congressional hall. His hands were cold and tight as they gripped the paper speech he had prepared over the course of weeks, hand-written notes still jotted in the margins as tribute to his excessive pursuit of perfection. In truth, none of them were needed as the whole of the document had already been committed to memory.

  He was by no means a young man, a dusting of gray installed across his scalp, but was far from the oldest representative in the governing body. Half a career earlier, he had arrived with little more than a single objective. Today, God willing, he would see it fulfilled. The sensation of a rising chorus built beneath him, as if the final chord of the finale were about to be struck and usher forth a new age of humanity.

  One of his staunchest antagonists, Senator Mathers, occupied the podium mostly outside of earshot on the opposing side of the wall. Knowing his fellow representative’s personality, Senator Leary could imagine what slanders, half-truths, and misdirection’s were being propagated. He had not even made a pronouncement or recommendation nor made his logical case as to what he would propose, yet his opposition was likely firing the opening volley on his character, ensuring the whole of the audience would be tainted by fear and find themselves unable to act. Such a terrible predicament it was, for someone to avoid his solemn duty against the body’s common interest.

  It would do them no good, Senator Leary assured himself. Each and every member of their hall had seen what had transpired over the last two decades. The pain and suffering had been borne by every world and home. He had lived through it all, just as the others, but with the difference that he felt responsible for the rolling decades of calamity, for not possessing the constitution to act sooner.

  The chamber erupted in a rancorous applause as the opposition completed his character assassination. He looked up as a staffer cracked the heavy wooden door which separated the two rooms.

  “Senator Leary, you’re up.”

  The words echoed off the paneled walls and polished stone floor with a quality that bordered on the musical. Senator Leary got to his feet and smoothed the collar on his finely-tailored jacket. He said not a word but felt the surge continue to build beneath him. He reminded himself that every precaution had been made. Regardless of what came over him, the work was done and he was now simply along for the ride. On this day, nothing fashioned against him would stand.

  Here he was about to embark on the greatest battle of his life, and yet he carried neither weapons nor armor. A ceramic helm did not protect his cranium and he did not stand on the command bridge of an interstellar battleship. There was no strategic campaign for which he was the tiniest speck of dust; all things considered, his life was hardly in danger. Yet through it all, he sensed the hand of providence guide his steps. For what he would begin on this day would save the Dominion countless lives.

  On the other side of the door, Senator Mathers gave him a sneering, sideways glance as he descended the heavy staircase from the speaker’s platform. Senator Leary paid it no mind and concentrated on the steps back up. The other man’s words meant nothing to him; they were nothing but waves crashing upon a granite breaker. Whatever his words had been, there would be no dissuading what would come to be.

  He placed the black leather portfolio on the lectern, opened it to the first page, and glanced across the audience. Most sat attentive, while others leaned back with crossed arms, while still others had turned their backs or exited the chamber entirely. It was their prerogative to blind themselves.

  Senator Leary cleared his throat and began, “Ladies and gentlemen, I entered this chamber twenty-four years ago, warning of a coming cataclysm. For that I was derided, ridiculed, and laughed out of the room. I survived two assassination attempts in my first year. In my third year, war broke out and here we are, minus ninety million lives and twenty-one years hence. Again, I stand before you with the same message and an identical warning.

  “This chamber has proven itself unable to govern neither its own affairs nor the dealings of its citizens across our frontier of time and space. The greatest laws of men have failed and we find ourselves at a dangerous crossroads. From here we will chart a course which will bring freedom, prosperity, and peace to every world in the galactic arm, or we will choose the petty, vindictive, self-destructive path already in motion and end in slavery, darkness, and a withering husk of a once-proud civilization.

  “I therefore propose a new paradigm. Rather than follow the failed policies, treaties, and laws that have left millions in the dust, we shall throw aside the full bonds of humanity’s institutions and be governed instead by the perfect and the logical.

  “For the first time in our evolution, we have developed a machine capable of reason. Our pursuits have made it feel. Our suffering has made it compassionate. I propose we gift this impossible task of governance to the greatest of the machines, to make the decisions that will allow us to survive. Allow us to flourish, take risks, and remain accountable to reason alone.”

  One of the senators still in attendance got to his feet. “You cannot be serious!” He shouted down at the speaker, affixed on the podium, “The Dominion must have the council as the seat of power!”

  Senator Leary snapped his head up from the page, instantly finding the o
ne standing figure among the crowd. “You, sir, have found yourself utterly incapable of performing the duties of which you swore an oath! Every one of us is complacent in this travesty of governance, and if you are not willing to tell your world that you have abdicated your power, then by God I will do it for you!”

  The words thundered from the reaches of the domed chamber, striking a collective nerve as Senator Leary watched a multitude of the audience straighten up in their seats. The offending voice shrank back, unable or unwilling to follow the senator’s pronouncement. For a moment, the echo of his words died away, dissipating into the ether, leaving the deliberative body in silence. Senator Leary stared across the room with an icy visage, waiting for another comment before continuing on with his pronouncement.

  He returned to the notes. “I don’t expect this process to be easy; in fact, I imagine what is required will be the greatest burden of our lives. When it is complete, however, we will stand alone as harbingers of a new dawn of civilization, a world in which we are governed by logic, not by the ephemeral sensations of a hundred competing worlds, forever at odds over whims and forced to toil by the powerful.

  “Today I stand before you, as I did twenty-four years ago, and make the same request. Will you give up this chamber to the greater will of the Dominion, give up the power you have spent generations to amass, and forestall the next colossal blunder and save a quarter-billion lives? Our homes deserve nothing less than this, not only for their futures, but as penance for what we have allowed to transpire. I ask you one more time for your vote. Thank you.”

  Senator Leary closed the folder and left the stage, a roaring mix of applause, cheers, and boos filling the room. Every one of his compatriots was on their feet, many dismayed at the prospect of losing their authority. Meanwhile, others wore expressions of relief that one among them had put voice to the nagging sensations they felt late at night when their lies and politically correct storytelling failed their souls. He smiled with his back to them; perhaps there was hope for humanity after all.

  2

  A faint casting of fog drifted across an isolated compound on one of the least populated planets in the Dominion’s control. The facility had stood in that location for over a century, forgotten by most citizens of the human civilization. The exception being, of course, the few soldiers unlucky enough to draw it as an assignment, and the occasional settler who happened by on their way to some location more preferable.

  Just as the OSIRIS had planned.

  Burton’s Clutch, the otherwise forgettable name supplied by the first astronomer to discover it, was not on any current transportation route or relevant star chart. Aside from the initial fanfare of discovery, it had avoided the attention paid to many of the more accessible, valuable and strategic planets. After the current night, there would be one less reason to search it out.

  Being perpetually barren, rocky, and damp, inhabited in the temperate biomes by little more than lichen and patches of scraggly brush made for a dreary existence. The plant life, with more similarities to soft coral, swayed gracelessly in the thick air, searching for photons of sunlight above while churning through the veins of muddy turf below. Farther out and equally isolated in the countryside, several miniscule colonies similarly clung to life in their desperate attempt to scrape together an existence away from the prying eyes of a galactic government.

  “Power’s out. Proceed to objective.”

  The order echoed through the radios between a dozen special operators positioned at the edge of their objective: an isolated Dominion installation. The activities performed therein were of no consequence for the force; it went without saying that since the order had been given that it would be fulfilled, regardless of the dilemmas or cost to come. No one questioned orders in the pursuit of a stable world.

  Such a small facility would have remained nearly invisible, if not for the modest cluster of dish antennas and a flat phased array pointed toward the sky which protruded over the surrounding trees. Although suggesting an ongoing mission, their designs were so common as to further reduce interest.

  The diminutive footprint of the facility, designed to reduce impact on the local population, as well as keep anyone from looking too close, worked to the advantage of the team. Even though the arrival of a transport would perk up more than a few local ears, few would notice their descent from the sky in the dead of night.

  After a modest hike, the team members found themselves positioned only a short sprint from the only gate, unseen in the ditch twenty yards from the durable chain fence that served as the only physical method of protection.

  Lieutenant Mercer watched the pair of guards at the gate stumble about in the sudden darkness, lost in the unforeseen onset of twilight as the cluster of lamps ceased to function. “Take the gate,” he ordered softly through the channel. From deep in the distance, two suppressed shots snapped out and, with a quick rush of dirty air, dropped the two soldiers where they stood. The activity drew no attention, as was expected.

  Mercer scanned the entrance for a moment longer, checking for secondary movements but found none. “We’re clear. Move up,” he finally said, climbing up from the depression and taking a knee on the sandy road to guard their advance.

  The concrete fighting position that doubled as a guard shack was as dark as the rest of the compound without access to the generator. Normally, most systems would be augmented with local fuel cells, but remote locations like Burton’s Clutch garnered few notes of importance. Facilities this far removed from high-tempo life in the Dominion were only partially fueled or not at all. A virus, supplied by OSIRIS Command and applied by an advanced, unknowing infiltrator, did its job with unrepentant efficiency, simultaneously disabling the power network in addition to the individual nodes without so much as a spark.

  The glint of starlight reflected gently from the gate, as well as the line of fencing as it extended outward in both directions, useless against the unexpected assault. Mercer checked the position one more time and upon finding no movement in the deeper shadows, slunk to his feet and with a low yet expedited approach, continued into the base.

  “Base” implied a certain size or level of importance which was a misnomer of Burton’s Clutch. There was little more to the outpost than a small cluster of earthen bunkers, sealed with vault doors with each extending underground and piled high with dark, local soil and crushed stone harvested from the lowest cost supplier. They had been compacted with time, the indigenous plants now extending through the layers of rock as the doors turned towards sepia, gently oxidizing as the years battered down upon their exposed surfaces. The third and final guard rounded the wrong corner in a similar daze as the others and met a comparable end, facing a thirty-caliber bullet to the chest.

  Three such defenders were the expectation, according to the team’s orders. Five more targets were still at large, including two pairs of system operators and a lone supervisor to manage their actions and assume responsibility for communications with the rest of the Dominion. At present, there was no reason to consider any deviations from the established mission profile.

  The base’s five vaults were arranged like a pentagon, clustered around a clear quad containing a small landing pad and an accompaniment of communication equipment. Command, personnel, supply, armory, and a maintenance shop was the expected layout, and Mercer’s first fire team broke off to canvas the barracks for the off-duty operators. Simultaneously, the others set to work on the sealed door to the command bunker.

  While the rest of the facility was aged and evident of a society that had intended it to withstand the onslaught of time, the lock itself—a mixture of mechanical keys and biometric scanners—was far more modern and enhanced. It held fast until the four special operators returned from the barracks, carrying the officer-in-charge’s machined steel key along with his right arm, severed at the elbow, in order to counter both the handprint and subdermal radio-frequency tag.

  Behind the door was nothing more than a few square feet of
corrugated steel to serve as a landing, a utility elevator, and a spiral staircase which provided emergency access to the lower extremities of the station. There, the fire teams split again, each taking an avenue of approach so as to reduce the risk of total compromise.

  The elevator doors opened, revealing to Mercer and his companions a small, unlit command center containing a semicircular arc of workstations and a few disparate pieces of service equipment at the sides. The facing wall was comprised of a long set of paneled windows, the contents of the far side of which he could not discern, flanked by rows of larger status monitors above their heads. In its entirety, the scene took barely a second to process until the soldiers spied the pair of swing shift workers still blinded in the darkness. They had evidently made it halfway from their stations to the access shaft, but two bursts of silenced fire from the team dropped them like the others.

  Together, Mercer’s squad froze in place, scouring the room for any sign of secondary movement. Every corpse had been accounted for, yet there was always a part of their training that reminded them not to take chances. A secure Dominion facility was a low risk, but after enough close calls, that corner of their minds refused to be shut out of the process.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  The confirmations echoed between the operators and Mercer relaxed his stance, letting his rifle drop from his shoulder to his chest. “All clear,” he said and broke from the formation. “Opposing force neutralized. Bring the power back.”

  A distant rumble shuddered through the facility, the illuminated panels above their heads flickering on in quick succession. The room itself showed its age, more of a cavern than a state-of-the art government installation. The workstations were clean and clear, except for those splattered with blood from the unfortunate staff members. On the opposing side of the glass, more lights sparked to life, and Mercer carefully approached the panes, drawn by their ultimate target.