Humanity had survived the previous century and change largely by proving to be more trouble to destroy than it was worth. The US had squashed its first enemy, the Risshah, a.k.a. the Snakes, quickly enough, but the Snakes had been minor players themselves. Knocking down another kid in a schoolyard didn’t mean you could go up against a pro boxer. The next conflicts had been with other small-timers or, in the case of the Gremlins, as part of a larger coalition. The US had established a reputation for ruthlessness and lethality, which combined with humanity’s warp abilities had been enough to convince most everyone to leave well enough alone. Far larger and more populous Starfarers had decided it was better to let humans be. Until now: the Alliance had decided to call America’s bluff, and the disparity in resources made defeat all but inevitable.
Heather thought of her family, living in Ohio and Luna City, fat, happy and utterly unprepared for the fiery death that would follow even two or three lost battles. America had to win just about every fight to survive. The enemy only had to win a couple of times, maybe just once. That was the reason behind this Hail Mary of a diplomatic mission. Or, for that matter, undergoing a treatment that would do God only knew what to her brain.
A truly rational species would calculate the odds, lie down and quietly wait for death. But Americans liked to dream big, liked to think their country had a greater destiny, on Earth and among the stars. Even a cynic like herself had fallen prey to that shared delusion, fallen hard enough to put her own life on the line over it.
She sighed. If enough people worked on that dream or delusion, they might actually make it a reality.
“All right, doctor. Let’s get to it.”
Four
Aboard the SS Brunhild, Lahiri System, 166 AFC
It wasn’t often a Marine captain sat down to dinner with a general, not to mention the US Secretary of State. Having June and Heather at the same table just added a little extra to the proceedings. This was going to be a meal Fromm wasn’t going to enjoy.
He sipped on his soft drink while casually glancing around at the rest of dinner party: an even dozen people sitting at a table in one of Brunhild’s smaller dining rooms, one reserved for intimate gatherings.
Sec-State Michelle Goftalu was a tall and slender woman, her gray hair done up in a tight bun, her warm smile and friendly expression making her resemble a kindly grandmother or a counselor, which probably suited a diplomat as well. She was ninety-seven years old and had spent most of her twelve terms as a Senator serving in the Foreign Relations Committee before being tapped for her current post. The fact she was there was either a good indication of how important this mission was, or a sign she wasn’t highly regarded at the White House. Fromm didn’t follow politics closely enough to know which. He’d ask Heather next time they were alone.
Heather was there ostensibly as the personal assistant to Deborah Smith, the Secretary’s Chief of Staff, and as one of the Tah-Leen’s personally-invited guests. Her CIA status was pretty much an open secret, which had likely ruined her career as a field agent. That might explain her blank expression. June Gillespie, sitting two seats down from her, might also account for her mood, although that could be Fromm flattering himself. He’d avoided June since their dinner at Musik, and he intended to give his former friend a wide berth during this cruise.
General Raymond Gage sat at the other end of the table as the co-host of the semi-formal dinner. A stocky, gruff man, with a high-and-tight haircut and a bulldog face, he looked like the drill instructor he once had been. Gage was a maverick who’d started his career as an enlisted man and worked his way to O-7, commanding troops in two wars and three lesser conflicts and accumulating two master’s degrees and one Ph.D. along the way. He’d been a line officer for most of his career, which made him one of the good guys in Fromm’s book.
Mario Rockwell was seated next to Fromm. The former Navy man had been the Regional Security Officer in Kirosha; he had taken over after former Ambassador Llewellyn folded like the cowardly rat he was. Without Rockwell, Fromm and every human on Jasper-Five would have died. That made him another good guy. A few other Kirosha survivors were present at the table, including Major Zhang, looking spiffy in her Marine dress blues, but also distracted, as if she was getting imp messages during dinner, which would be a pretty serious faux pas. On the other hand, she might be suffering from warp-induced stress disorder; Fromm couldn’t imagine how anyone could endure as many transits as the new fighter pilots had during the year or so since they’d been in the service.
He exchanged a glance with the Agent in Charge of the Secretary’s Protective Detail, another Marine. She was a tall woman, with short brown hair and sharp features; her face appeared to be locked in a no-nonsense expression Fromm could appreciate. Georgina Petrosyan had left active duty as a major and been with the State Department for over two decades. She’d commanded an infantry company during the war against the Horde and gotten the requisite commendations and decorations along the way. Petroysan nodded at him; they’d spent some time together working to integrate their respective commands in case of an emergence. The DS personnel were all trained in small-unit tactics, and had access to combat armor, military small arms and even some crew-served weapons. If it came down to a fight, the Detail was the equivalent of a light infantry platoon. They planned to run several joint training exercises during the trip to Xanadu.
The usual meaningless pleasantries were exchanged and nothing of much importance was said until after the main course was consumed and the dishes removed. The only comment that stuck in Fromm’s mind was when some State Department puke spoke up.
“I propose a toast in the hopes that this First Contact with a wise and ancient species is peaceful and beneficial to both sides,” the man said.
Fromm raised his glass and drank, but he felt mildly annoyed at the toast Running into a new alien polity rarely worked out that way. Most of the time, there was a clear winner – and an obvious loser. You often could tell who the loser was because its species was no longer around. To him, ‘contact’ meant locating an enemy before going on the attack. Intellectually, he understood that viewing any alien as a potential enemy wasn’t a nice way to view the universe. But he had a bad feeling about these particular aliens. Fromm had stopped believing in Santa Claus at a very early age, and he had a hard time believing some ‘wise and ancient’ species had invited them over so it could hand out gifts for everybody. The Snowflakes wanted something, and he’d be surprised if it wasn’t something the Americans wouldn’t want to give up.
All of which meant he wasn’t very surprised when Secretary Goftalu got down to business.
“I’m sure all of you have gone over the information we have on the Tah-Leen,” she said. “Which, as it turns out, isn’t very much. They are a very private civilization, one with very restricted dealings with the rest of the galaxy. They do not accept embassies, and as far as anybody knows, not a single member of that species has stepped outside its home system for at least as far back as any Starfarer records go. Their decline and fall happened millennia before the oldest current polity came into being. A few fragments of badly-translated historical accounts are all we have to go on. That, and some disquieting intelligence we developed shortly before our departure. Ms. Smith?”
“Disquieting is, if anything, an understatement,” Chief of Staff Deborah Smith said. She was an unassuming-looking woman with grey hair and severe features. “The CIA and NSA have gathered a great deal of evidence showing that a large number of vessels flying assorted Starfarer flags passed through Xanadu – and were never heard of again. The system’s traffic control system shows them departing as scheduled, but they never arrived to their destination.”
Several of the dinner guests looked shocked at the news. Heather didn’t; she must have been briefed already, or been one of the evidence-gatherers in question.
“We have identified just under twelve hundred disappearances over the last century,” Smith continued. “Since some five hundred to a thou
sand ships make transit at Xanadu every month, this is a miniscule number, but a dozen missing ships a year is triple the normal loss rate you see at other nexus points with similar traffic levels. Warp travel is never fully safe, of course, but for some reason it is even more hazardous around Xanadu.”
“So what does this mean?” General Gage asked.
“All we have at the moment is conjectures,” Heather said. “It could be that the Tah-Leen pick off passing ships for unknown reason. We don’t know what, if anything, they did to those ships, or why. It can’t be piracy – Xanadu generates more revenue in a year than the combined value of the all the ships that went missing over the last century, even assuming none of them fell prey to normal warp accidents.”
“Or it could be something completely different,” Ms. Smith countered. “Maybe something in the local spacetime curvature around the system is affecting FTL travel through it. We consulted some astrophysicists and got back several possible explanations. What makes us suspicious is that the disappearances tend to occur at the same intervals: between twenty and forty days. Such a steady rate seems too regular to be a natural event.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t lost any of our ships.”
“No American ships have disappeared in Xanadu, but two human merchantmen have. A Columbian-flagged vessel fifty years ago, and one from the GACS about twenty years before them. Both governments launched inquiries but got nowhere with the Tah-Leen, other than receiving a copy of the arrival and departure records. The Hrauwah, who’ve lost a good dozen ships during that time, also got nowhere with their investigations. Anyone who pushed matters further was threatened with the loss of transit privileges through the system. Most Starfarers will simply let the matter drop at that point. All of which is somewhat worrisome under the current circumstances.”
“So we are heading into what may be a trap of some sort, and there is next to nothing we can do about it,” AIC Petrosyan said, her expression showing how little she liked that idea. “We have a six-destroyer squadron for an escort, fifty agents in the protective detail, thirty master-at-arms aboard the Brunhild, and the Marine company we brought along for a dog and pony show. What was the most heavily-armed ship among the missing?”
“The most notorious disappearance involved a multi-ship formation about two hundred years ago. A Lutarri five-vessel task force,” Heather said. “Two light cruisers, a battlecruiser, a troop transport with a regimental-sized complement, and a converted transport carrying a diplomatic delegation. The records of their mission have been scrubbed, but by reading between the lines we believe they went to Xanadu on a mission not unlike our own. A month after their arrival, they officially left the system – and vanished into hard vacuum for all anyone knows”
“The Lizards didn’t declare war over that?” General Gage asked; his use of the Lutarri’s common nickname made Secretary Goftalu frown slightly. “That’s not like them at all. They’ll throw down even over unintended insults to their honor.”
“Not only did they not officially react to the event, they did their best to erase all records of the disappearance,” Smith said. “Our analysts had to piece it together from data that couldn’t be easily doctored or erased. Basically, some ten thousand personnel ceased to exist, along with the vessels involved. We had to retrace their steps by using secondary sources of information the Lutarri didn’t quite manage to eliminate.”
“This is crazy,” the Marine general said. “You’d expect someone to call the Snowflakes’ bluff.”
“The last time someone launched a major attack against Xanadu was four thousand years ago. The Nootari civilization sent a large fleet into the system with the intention of seizing it. Over three hundred warships of all classes went in and were utterly destroyed. According to the records of passing civilian ships that witnessed the battle, the attack inflicted no discernable damage on the Tah-Leen facility. That defeat led to the downfall of the Nootari. Within a century or so, their species and civilization were extinct; most of their former colonies were absorbed by the Galactic Imperium. More recently, a Horde incursion about ninety years ago was also obliterated. I didn’t include their thirty ships and three asteroid bases into the count of disappearances, because those vessels’ fate is on record. They were engaged and destroyed by Xanadu’s defenses.”
Fromm frowned. The Horde were nomadic raiders, traversing space in massive warp-capable converted asteroids. Their ships consisted mostly of captured and scavenged hulks, fitted with whatever weapons they could steal. The incursion Heather was describing would be bad news for a lightly-defended system, or for a small formation like the destroyer squadron escorting the Brunhild, but not against serious opposition. Still, it showed that Xanadu could still defend itself.
“The long and the short of it, ladies and gentlemen, is that we need to prepare for the worst,” Sec-State said. “First and foremost, we must take the greatest care not to offend our hosts, because they are highly likely to respond to any transgressions violently. Secondly, I suggest you work on contingency plans for the possibility we may need to fight our way out of Xanadu. I know the most likely answer is that we’ll die in the attempt, and the US will be in no position to avenge us for at least the short and medium term. But if that is the case, let no one say we didn’t do our best.”
Fromm nodded approvingly at her words. The State Department was generally derided as being the province of ‘rats more interested in talking problems to death than actually accomplishing anything, and who considered fighting to be beneath them, but even they knew that when the shit hit the fan the best thing to do was to fight. Win or lose, the enemy needed to learn Americans wouldn’t meekly accept their fate. That had been a US tradition since First Contact.
“We’ll do what we can,” AIC Petroysan promised. “Captain Fromm and I have already drawn some contingency plans. We’ll reexamine them in light of this new information.”
Fromm cast a regretful glance at Heather.
So much for a pleasure cruise.
* * *
So much for having any fun at all.
Heather McClintock sat down with a sigh and looked at her fellow spooks.
“You didn’t tell your boyfriend about me, did you?” June Gillespie said, just a hint of accusation in her voice.
“Nope. He rejected your advances completely on his own,” Heather told her fellow agent with a smile. “Maybe you’re no longer his type. Assuming you ever were.”
“I turned him down, back in the day,” June said, not looking particularly upset about the whole thing. Her attempt to seduce Peter had been just basic fieldcraft. Test for weaknesses, even among your own people, because a cheater may end up betraying other confidences. The fact that she’d also score points on someone like Heather, whose meteoric rise hadn’t earned her many friends at the Agency, would have been mere icing on the cake.
“None of us have the plumbing to engage in a proper pissing contest,” the third agent in the room said in a bored tone.
Senior Special Agent Debbie Smith looked like what she normally pretended to be: a middle-aged, overworked chief of staff who wasn’t vain enough to spend her government salary on the rejuv treatments that could keep her looking twenty-nine for the rest of her life. Besides performing her official duties, Smith was a CIA operative who used her position in the State Department to handle dozens of covert agents, double-agents, informants and assorted other assets. Heather had no idea how she managed to do both jobs, and do them well. SOPHINT – Sophont Intelligence – was Smith’s specialty, although she’d also been known to dabble in Operations when circumstances required it. This assignment might well be one of those occasions.
“So let’s get down to business, shall we?” Smith went on. The three women were in her cabin; as work acquaintances, this after-hours gathering wouldn’t raise an eyebrow even if someone noticed it. And this room had a grav-wave disruptor field that made sure their conversation remained private.
“Yes, let’s,” Heather agree
d, ignoring the hostile looks from the junior agent.
She didn’t care for June Gillespie; the woman was just the kind of dilettante that the Agency often attracted, people bored with mundane life who went into field work to have some adventures without the combination of tedium and danger that a military career entailed. Most of them didn’t stay for long; they lacked the patience to move up the ranks and the intestinal fortitude to make the tough choices that sort of work often demanded. Ms. Gillespie had joined the CIA shortly after graduating at NIT. Her career at Boeing and this later posting at the State Department had been part of her cover. Her track record wasn’t very impressive, and there probably would have been bad blood between her and Heather even if the woman hadn’t made a move on Peter.
“I’m here to brief you on the Agency’s own contingency plans,” Smith said. “AIC Petrosyan will do her best, of course, but I think we can all agree that no conventional solution is possible if the Tah-Leen turn out to be hostile.”
“You can say that again,” June said. “Peter and his jarheads may be able to slaughter primitive aliens by the cartload, but they aren’t going to do much against an advanced civilization.”
Tell that to the Vipers, Heather thought.
“On the other hand, what do you expect us to do?” June asked. “Hack into a two-hundred-thousand-year-old civilization’s systems?”
“Software development seems to have been relatively stable over the last few millennia,” Heather said. “The Puppies have done some innovative work along those lines, but they are the exception to the rule.”
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 7