by Alex Lamb
The senators bristled. Statesman let out a silent wail.
‘Might I suggest that we all step back for a moment and take stock?’ said Pari brightly. This was her safety phrase for Will, to let him know when he’d gone too far.
Gaius Ochoa pointed a bony finger at Will’s chest. ‘You’re on thin ice with that remark, Monet,’ he said. ‘Pricing pressure on contractors would only cause them to look for savings elsewhere, and that would mean a reduction of safety protocols. We don’t have control over how those businesses are run.’
‘The prices wouldn’t have to change,’ said Will, ‘just the oversight. Do you have a problem with that?’
By now, Gaius Ochoa’s face had taken on an unhealthy hue. ‘Captain Monet,’ he growled, ‘oversight of Exodus projects is not the job of this committee. Did you accidentally come to the wrong meeting?’
Will knew he’d scorched the negotiation but it wasn’t as if he’d ever had much of a chance. Talking with these people always felt pointless. He could have killed all of them with his bare hands, of course, but what good would that do? So he gripped the podium in front of him instead, the strength of his augmented fingers drilling holes in the organically sourced hardwood.
‘You’re right again,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t be funding the Fleet to investigate corruption. And you certainly shouldn’t have to put any pressure on the people robbing us blind. I tell you what – why don’t I do it instead? That’d be more fun than meetings, anyway. I’ll get Admiral Baron to okay it for me to start doing random spot checks on private cargoes,’ he said, idly making a pattern of dents in the podium’s surface. The wood cracked under his hands. ‘Let’s see who I can catch. No need to use Fleet ships, just Ariel Two. We already know that dozens of sect outfits are breaking the law, and some Colonial companies, too. Now, who should I go after first?’
He glanced around the room at the senators, sizing each of them up. They regarded him with expressions of stunned alarm. All except Pari Voss, whose face bore a look of weary despair.
‘Any recommendations?’ Will prompted. ‘I’d love to get my hands on some of the people who’re screwing us over, wouldn’t you?’
For once, the senators had no reply. They’d never seen such an overt threat in a political meeting. Who else but Will Kuno-Monet would be allowed to get away with it?
The human race only had one super-person. When the galaxy-spanning Transcended race offered Will support and decided to spare humankind rather than torching them – as they had the unfortunate Fecund – their help came in the form of gifts. Along with granting Will control over the most powerful ship in human space, they’d also changed his body. He could move faster than the eye could see and crush steel with his hands. Pepper him full of bullets, as people had tried to do on numerous occasions, and his body healed in minutes. At the end of the day, political manoeuvring with Will only worked because he always played nice. Always. These days, though, his patience was wearing awfully thin.
Pari Voss opened her mouth to say something placating, only to be interrupted by a ping from the room’s SAP.
‘Excuse me, Captain Monet, but we have a message marked Urgent Alpha, executive eyes only.’
Will blinked away his anger. That rating encompassed both him and the senate but almost nobody else. It couldn’t be good.
‘Put it on the screen, please,’ he said.
The committee room’s monitor wall swapped to video display.
‘This is a recording taken at Survey Star Nine-One-Nine, provisionally named Tiwanaku,’ said the SAP. ‘It was recorded by the escort scout IPS Reynard and forwarded via emergency messenger drone. The events captured occurred approximately four weeks ago, local frame time.’
The video started and Will saw what Captain Tom Okano-Lark had seen. After the Reynard initiated battle mode, the perspective jumped to grainy footage from the drone’s onboard telescope, pointed back towards the ship. The picture flickered with every pulse of warp. They caught a brief final glimpse of the Reynard accelerating to avoid the unidentified swarm closing on it, and then nothing.
A cold silence fell across the hall. One senator nervously cleared his throat. The hair on Will’s neck stood up straight.
‘Have we heard from the Reynard since the drone’s release?’ he said.
‘No,’ the room replied.
If the Reynard had survived, it would undoubtedly have followed up with an All Clear.
‘How was this message forwarded?’ Pari asked in a hushed voice.
‘Via Far Frontier Headquarters in the New Panama System and priority fuelling stars. Security Level Freddie has been applied since initial receipt.’
‘Then we’re the first in the home system to know.’
‘Along with Admiral Baron, yes,’ said the room.
Will looked back at the senators’ faces, their expressions now blank with surprise. This had been an unusual morning for them. In Pari’s eyes, he saw something like compassion.
‘This rather changes things, doesn’t it?’ she said.
Will nodded. Suddenly, the tables had turned. If they moved to a war footing, he wouldn’t have to worry much about senate approval any more since the democratic functions of IPSO were suspended during a Fleet emergency. Funding battles would be the least of their problems.
Will didn’t find himself enjoying that knowledge. Instead it made him feel obscurely guilty, as if he was no longer playing by the rules he’d set himself.
‘I’ll get this sorted out,’ he told the staring faces around him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure it’s resolved.’
‘We’ll help however we can,’ said Pari.
‘Thank you,’ said Will. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I should probably go and speak to the admiral.’ He nodded his respects and headed for the door.
If the attack had actually been perpetrated by aliens, who knew what else they’d be capable of? The Transcended who helped Will end the war had been able to remotely blow up stars on a whim. Nevertheless, Will felt excitement bubbling up. Here, at last, was a problem worthy of his abilities. Maybe he’d get a chance to actually do some good for once.
2: GATHERING
2.1: WILL
Will paced the transit pod as it whisked him across Bradbury to the Admiralty building at three times the legal speed limit. The SAP begged him to take a seat with every wild turn it took through the transport web. Will ignored it.
The pod segued onto a vertical track and raced up the side of the building, shunting others aside with override warnings, and deposited him at the entrance to Ira’s suite. The doors leapt open just in time to miss Will’s striding feet.
Ira’s office filled a four-hundred-square-metre slice of sparsely decorated tower-habitat with cyber-thyme flooring and off-white organic walls. At the far end, a huge window-wall looked onto the glassy, peach-tinted ruins of the Mars Pioneers Historical Park. Ira stood near it, instructing most of his entourage and furniture to leave.
‘… Monet is here, I said. Everybody out except you two chairs. That’s right, you two.’
He ushered them through the archway into the planning chamber beyond. As soon as the doors had shut, he turned to greet Will with an urgent grimace.
‘You heard, then?’
They’d both changed since they first flew together during the war, but Will always felt that Ira had managed the last thirty years better than him. Sure, Will hadn’t aged a day and had beaten everything from cancer to chemical attacks, but Ira had found ways to be happy. When his role in history forced him into politics, Ira adapted. Now, instead of managing a ship, he managed a civilisation – or at least that part of it which pertained to interplanetary security. Ira hadn’t balked when IPSO’s Social Engineering Division insisted on increasing his height, or straightening his nose, or electing him Fleet Admiral six times in a row. Will wasn’t sure how he’d stuck with
it. When Will asked, the only answer Ira ever gave was: If I don’t do it, it’ll be some other poor shmuck whose decisions I like less.
They’d let him keep his trademark bald head, at least – for brand-persistence reasons, apparently.
‘The room is secure,’ said Ira. ‘We can talk.’
Will had already checked for himself. He habitually managed his own security and had never been happy handing off control to the Fleet, not even with a friend like Ira in charge.
‘I have a question,’ said Will. ‘Am I still ambassador to aliens?’
That title hadn’t meant anything useful for twenty years, just hung around his neck like an albatross – a convenient label for his enemies to mock him with.
Ira nodded. ‘Of course. And handling this is definitely your job. With the scale of threat this event implies, we need the big guns out there, and that means you and the Ariel Two. But realistically speaking, we both know this isn’t likely to be an extraterrestrial problem.’
After humanity’s interaction with the preeminent Transcended race, a flurry of research had been conducted regarding the probabilities of various kinds of contact scenarios. Hugo Bessler-Vartian, the irascible physicist who’d accompanied them on that fateful mission which led to first contact, had taken the fortune he made from his work on Fecund technologies and poured it into research on aliens. Specifically, on what he perceived as the alien threat to humanity.
The conclusions had been stark: the probability of encountering a species as old and powerful as the Transcended far outweighed that of finding one of a similar age to humankind. The apparent rarity of intelligent species in the universe made sure of that. With so few civilisations to be discovered, the likelihood of finding one the same age as your own was almost zero. Consequently, the probability of finding aliens who would attack the human race in any recognisable way was also vanishingly small. Humanity was far more likely to be wiped out as a pest before they’d even noticed.
‘You think it was some kind of power grab by a sect, then,’ said Will, ‘dressed up to look weird.’
Ira glanced at him sidelong. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Sure – it’s the logical conclusion,’ Will admitted. ‘But why bother?’ Part of him wanted the attack to be exactly what it appeared to be simply because it would give him something practical to do. ‘Think of the expense,’ he said. ‘The drones, the radiation blast, the modified engines. Not to mention hiding all the construction beforehand. It’d cost billions to pull off. And for what?’
‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ said Ira. ‘Since that message showed up ten minutes ago, our research cluster has been hard at work trying to find out.’
He waved a hand at the nearest wall, which screened-on to display a freeze-frame of the terrified youth from the video the Reynard had intercepted.
‘We just received this,’ said Ira. ‘We don’t know who he is yet, but that jacket he’s wearing is a giveaway. Our SAPs traced the buttons on his lapel – those insignia belong to the Knights of Kolob, which is the underground Truist Revival branch of the Smithite sect, a group known to have invested heavily in Flag-Dropping.’
These days, every sect on Earth had a Revivalist branch of some kind. Even with his augmented memory, Will struggled to keep track of them all. Before the war, there had only been Truism – the belief in the supremacy of man over all of nature – with Earth’s church at the top. While foreign to Will’s sensibilities, he could at least wrap his head around it.
Then, at the end of the war, Gustav Ulanu had realigned the faith under Transcendism: the idea that there were benign mentor species in the universe hoping to guide humanity towards God’s truth. For a while, it had looked like the new doctrine was going to convince everyone to cooperate. But after years of silence from the Transcended, religious politics had slid inexorably away from them. After Ulanu’s assassination, that process had accelerated dangerously.
‘But the Knights are small fry,’ said Ira. ‘They only have a tiny share of the Flag movement, which makes me wonder: if this attack was some kind of inter-sect warning, why bother? The Smithites can hardly be the target – they’re not worth the investment.’
Ira brought up a freeze-frame of the two ramshackle gunships. ‘Then there’s the shuttles the Reynard encountered. We can’t say for certain but we think they belong to Truth Reborn, the Revivalist arm of Theravad Plus – a bigger player, for sure, but still hardly worth this kind of attention.’
‘You think all this is a message for the Fleet, then?’ said Will.
‘Maybe,’ said Ira. ‘The fact that both Flags and legit colonists were attacked suggests that whoever did this wants everyone to be afraid. Our strategy software thinks the subtext here is a group making a play to set themselves up as a separate government. They’re using the alien motif to make everyone back off till they can get it together.’
‘But who?’ said Will. ‘The Old Colonies wouldn’t bother, and there can’t be more than a handful of sects on Earth with the money to pull that off.’
‘That’s what I want you to find out,’ said Ira. ‘To minimise the panic, the public will be told it’s a hoax and that we’re sending an investigation team. At the same time, we’re telling the senate that an exodiplomatic mission is unavoidable, just in case this is exactly what it looks like – a first-contact situation.’
Will frowned. ‘Why the double message?’
‘Because it gives the Fleet the most leeway to operate. And it rules out any political argument for keeping you off the mission – after all, you’re still humanity’s expert when it comes to dealing with aliens. The negotiation around this is going to be fast and nasty, I’m afraid. We need ships out there as soon as possible, but Earth’s senators will be pushing for control. They’ll try to delay things to force us to accept more of their people on the team. They’re already furious that this event makes their sects look like a bunch of planet-grabbing, warmongering assholes.’
Will snorted. ‘Imagine that.’
‘The good news is that Parisa Voss is on the Committee for E. T. Affairs, as is Bob Galt-Singh from Galatea. You’ll have to babysit some VIP diplomats and all that shit, but with luck they’ll cover the chit-chat, leaving you free to work.’
‘I can handle that,’ said Will. ‘When do we start?’
Ira reached out and took Will’s arm. His expression softened. ‘Soon, Will,’ he said. ‘Very soon. But first, my old friend, can we sit down for a moment?’
Ira’s sudden change of pace took Will by surprise but he knew better than to second-guess it. While he and Ira had remained close since the war, they’d spent little time relaxing together. If Ira had something to say, there had to be a reason, so he let Ira guide him to one of the chairs near the window.
The view from Ira’s room was far humbler than that from the senate’s executive suite. Probably no more than thirty storeys off the ground, the window looked out on a park that had been crowded around by modern architecture, leaving it in shadow for half the day.
‘Will, I have something to ask of you,’ said Ira, sitting across from him. ‘Something about this mission.’ He leaned forward.
‘Go on?’
‘I need you to bring me back a miracle.’
Will frowned. ‘Not sure I follow you,’ he said.
‘We’re in trouble,’ said Ira. ‘The Tiwanaku Event makes it obvious that the sects aren’t bothering with legal channels to build settlements any more. Once that gets out, IPSO loses the last of its credibility. War is just around the corner and this might be the start of it.’
‘I know things are bad right now—’ Will started.
Ira cut him off. ‘Unfortunately, you don’t know the half of it. The sects are gearing up – we’ve tracked the arms shipments. They’ve been waiting for this for years. And if we have another war, it won’t be like the last one. Suntaps and nestships ended
that war. Next time around, that’ll be what we start with. Presuming, that is, the Transcended let us get that far. It’ll be the end of everything, Will, believe me. We tried to build the future, you, me and Gustav,’ he said. ‘We let them put us in starring roles and we still fucked it up.’
Will folded his arms. ‘What else could we have done?’
Ira shrugged. ‘I don’t know. When I look back, so much makes me cringe. Like the whole senate business, for a start. Do you know why we settled on the Old American model for the IPSO council? So we could bake inequality into the system.’
Will wrinkled his nose. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Nobody wanted to make things unfair.’
‘No, but we did want to give a bunch of tiny colonies the same voice as a planet of billions. We created the Flag problem, Will, by giving ground on both sides, even when it didn’t make any sense. We forced the registration of new worlds with one hand while demanding fair treatment for all inhabitants with the other. We effectively manufactured an incentive for people to show up unannounced. The sects are going around us now precisely because that’s the only option we gave them.’
Will disliked the idea, particularly given how his last meeting had gone. ‘Sure, but still, I don’t think we could have predicted all this.’
‘Maybe not. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty and all that. But here’s my point: you need to bring something back, even if it’s only new technology. Whatever those faux-aliens used to nuke the comms, for instance. Had the Reynard encountered nothing more than an unlicensed colony, that would have been it – war. As it is, this weird attack will keep that door shut until everyone figures out what’s going on, but it won’t hold them for long. We need something to buy us some breathing room to figure out how to fix this mess. A diversion. An opportunity. Anything to pull us back from the brink. Otherwise the sects are going to trash the peace and that will be the end of us all. If I could go and do this myself, you know I would.’