by Alex Lamb
‘Easily,’ said Ann.
‘Once you’ve made the connection in person, everything should run by itself. I’ll forward you the details via the League channel. Does that work?’
‘Sure,’ said Ann.
‘And, needless to say, do keep this quiet,’ Sam added. ‘Best not to even share it within the League. If anything goes wrong, we want our people to have plausible deniability, as usual.’
‘Of course,’ said Ann.
She tried to hide her dismay at the prospect of carrying yet more secrets. But in a matter of weeks it’d all be over. She could hardly complain at this point.
‘Terrific,’ said Sam, breaking into a smile. ‘Time is of the essence, I’m afraid, so you’ll be leaving directly. You have a passenger berth on the Dolittle – it’s leaving for the home system in two hours.’
Ann was astonished afresh. ‘That doesn’t leave me much time to pack.’
‘River is doing it for you right now,’ said Sam.
‘That’s a relief,’ she lied. Apparently she wasn’t going home even for a day.
Sam stopped as the gravel path looped back to face the transit station and stuck out his hand for her to shake.
‘Look, I know this is a tough call, but you’re the best I’ve got. The next time we meet will be on Triton, and I won’t be able to be half this chummy. So this is me saying good luck now. I know you’ll do great.’ He offered her a rough half-smile.
‘I appreciate it, sir,’ she said, feeling pride and terror in equal measures as she shook his hand. ‘And thank you.’
‘Welcome to the most dangerous mission in history,’ said Sam. ‘See you in a couple of weeks.’
She managed a watery smile and a salute as she stepped towards the pod.
3: ARRIVAL
3.1: WILL
Two days before he was due to depart, Will met Pari Voss at the Bogota spaceport. They transferred to her private lifter and made for Mexico City with all haste. Pari’s lounge had a window-wall where passengers could take in the view. They drank Nibiru sours and caught up while jagged, grey mountains slid past beneath, reaching up out of a pale and furious sea.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
‘Great,’ said Will guardedly. He knew Pari wouldn’t have asked him to come down if there hadn’t been a pressing need. ‘Scrambling to pull everything together in time but enjoying it.’
He’d spent most of the intervening three weeks feeling impatient to leave while IPSO’s bureaucracy had dragged its heels at every turn. Fortunately, getting Mark involved had lifted his mood immeasurably. His dreams about the war had stopped, which came as an incredible relief.
‘How about you? What’s the deal?’
Pari had been handling the political fallout from Ira’s announcement of the mission and her request to see him here was undoubtedly related. However, she hadn’t forwarded him details about their upcoming meeting which usually meant that, legally speaking, it wasn’t happening.
‘Not so great. Somebody leaked the fact that you have a link to Mark to the E.T. Affairs group in the House Proportional.’
Will rose out of his chair. ‘They did what?’
Only a handful of people in the senate knew about Mark’s past and all of them had been sworn to secrecy. Will had worked for years to keep the young roboteers from his failed Omega Programme out of the public eye. It had been an endless source of stress and misery for him and after the tribunal it had only grown harder.
‘Now E.T. Affairs think you’re packing the mission with your cronies and trying to pass them off as allies of Earth. Or that’s what they’re saying, at least. They’re threatening to cry foul and block the mission.’
‘Who did this?’ said Will, his fingers curled into claws.
Pari threw up her hands. ‘We’re still figuring that out. For all we know the information has been sitting out there for a while and the House has just been waiting for the right time to apply it. In any case, the good news is that we have a solid commitment that word hasn’t gone any further.’
‘From whom?’ Will growled.
‘From my guy in the House Proportional,’ said Pari. ‘His name is Ezekiel Wei. Zeke knew my husband. Our kids used to play together. He’s okay. Really.’
Pari didn’t like talking about the loss of her family. A Revivalist splinter group had killed them all while she was away on senate business. It had been a sad, bloody affair, so Will didn’t push it further. He sank back into his chair and glowered at the dead ocean.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Pari. ‘He’s got our backs. And that’s who we’re going to meet. We’re going to Mexico to show willingness to compromise.’
Will frowned at her. ‘Are we willing?’
‘Of course not,’ said Pari. ‘Unless you’ve changed your mind.’
Will peered furiously into his glass. ‘I thought they couldn’t block the mission in any case.’
‘No, but they could tie us up in paperwork for weeks. And by that time, every sect and colony will have sent their own missions.’
‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Will. ‘I don’t care what they fucking want. I’m done with this shit. I’m leaving in two days whether they like it or not.’
‘And you can do that,’ said Pari. ‘Just realise that if you do, Mark won’t be coming with you. Nobody can stop you leaving on the Ariel Two, but the Gulliver is a diplomatic ship under IPSO control.’ She looked at the expression on his face and sighed. ‘Will, don’t go in confrontational, I beg you. You’ll hurt our cause. This should be a very quiet meeting. Trust him and leave him room and we can probably resolve this.’
Will downed the rest of his drink. Alcohol hadn’t touched his metabolism in thirty years – a fact he lamented from time to time. Still, the drink’s bite helped stiffen his resolve.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Do we know what they want?’
‘That’s the other piece of bad news,’ said Pari. ‘They want you to hand off diplomatic leadership of the mission to Yunus Chesterford.’ She glanced down at his hands gripping the arms of the chair. ‘Will, please don’t break the furniture. Titanium loungers are so difficult to replace.’
‘Yunus Chesterford is a dick,’ said Will. ‘No way. That guy has tried to fuck me over more times than I can count. He’s gone on record as a Transcended-denier, for crying out loud.’
‘I know, Will,’ said Pari. ‘I know. He’s Earth’s pet exoscience pundit. If he could roll the clock back and bring Sanchez out of the grave, he’d probably do it.’
‘That’s because he has no fucking idea what the High Church was like. They used to string up intellectuals like him and flay their skin off with nanowire.’
‘Let’s just see what Zeke has to say, huh?’ said Pari. ‘We’ll be there in a few minutes. We can get angry later.’
The conversation petered out after that, leaving Will alone with his thoughts. His last run-in with the Chesterfords on the biosphere world of Davenport loomed in his memory.
Humanity had discovered several biospheres during its expansion, each as useless as the last. Earth’s organisms appeared to either destroy alien life or wither before it. One biochemistry always found a way to dominate and co-opt the other. So rather than wrestle with the ecological nightmares biospheres caused, colonists tended to seek out lifeless Mars Plus worlds instead. They lived contentedly under plastic domes and left life-bearing planets for scientists and thrill-seekers with no fear of cancer.
Davenport was an extreme case. Its life was among the most virulently disruptive that humanity had ever found. The entire planet had been cordoned off to prevent the risk of its flora and fauna being weaponised by terrorist groups.
Which was why Will had chosen that site for his experiment in personal duplication. Away from prying eyes where nobody could get hurt, Will had taken over a small lake between two mos
s-spattered hills and consumed enough of the local biota to build a backup copy of himself. Or a near copy, at least. The experiment, like most of his endeavours since the war, had been a flop. Something in the structure of his smart-cells prevented him from making a complete duplicate. The clone had been a sort of shadow-Will, halfway between himself and a walking SAP. Useful, perhaps, but not the reserve copy for the human race he’d hoped for. After three days of life, it committed suicide, but not before sharing the full extent of its personal anguish about Rachel with him.
To Will’s dismay, it turned out that Citra Chesterford, Yunus’s wife, was leading one of the Davenport research teams at the time. Despite signing the Fleet nondisclosure agreement and promising silence to his face, she passed knowledge of the failed experiment to Yunus the moment he’d left the system. Yunus had promptly turned it into a political weapon. Will was still living out the consequences.
With some difficulty, he forced himself back to the present and tried to concentrate on the view that Pari’s senatorial lifter afforded. Like many of the world’s metropolitan areas, Mexico City had acquired its share of supertowers. They jutted out from between earlier, less battleship-like forms of architecture, most of which had been allowed to dissolve in the worsening weather. As they nosed towards their destination, a tethering arm reached out of the building to meet them, bearing an old-fashioned transit pod with real windows.
Zeke met them there. He turned out to be a dapper individual with small features and tidily oiled hair tinted a conservative blue to match his jacket.
‘Parisa, Will, wonderful to see you. Thank you so much for coming. Only chit-chat until we reach the safe room, please. Security in ArcoCinco is not what it used to be.’
Will stared at the man and tried to restrain himself from saying something unpleasant.
The pod took them down into the body of the tower, granting some impressive views over the grey infinity of Mexico City’s rubble-maze on the way.
‘I see you have vegetation down there,’ said Pari, pointing to some feeble patches of green. ‘That’s impressive.’
Zeke shrugged. ‘Small-scale projects. It’s all for show. Surface plants cost more to manage than they give back. All the real farming is underground nowadays, like everywhere else.’
The pod swapped track and descended into the tower’s vast hollow interior. The top floors had been well maintained, Will noted, at odds with his expectations. They looked, if anything, better off than some of the habitats he’d seen on Mars. About forty levels below, though, things got ugly. Down in the building’s central well, Will could make out the scars of flenser damage on the ceramic walls, and long, dark streaks of something unpleasant on the plastic windows.
The pod dropped them at a penthouse meeting room with a real lawn and apple trees. They sat down around an antique Formica meeting table to talk.
‘We’re ready to pull the plug and start over,’ said Zeke cheerfully.
Pari sighed. ‘Do that and we’ll all lose valuable time, the sects and the Fleet both. Plus any mission the sects send by themselves will lack credibility.’
‘Granted. But my committee can’t green-light something when they’ve been taken out of the loop altogether.’
‘That hasn’t happened,’ said Pari.
Zeke shot her an incredulous glance. ‘Really? Then how come you’re recruiting already?’
‘Some parts of the mission are negotiable and others aren’t,’ she said. ‘It makes sense for us to make progress on those elements that aren’t.’
‘So the nepotistic inclusion of Will’s protégé is non-negotiable?’
Will pressed his hand against the table, being careful not to break it.
‘First up,’ said Will, ‘ship’s captain is a Fleet position and we’ll pick staff for Fleet roles as we see fit. Secondly, the selection is not nepotistic. I picked Mark because he’s the best starship pilot the Fleet has ever produced. Bar none. Or did your source forget to mention that while they were laying out the juicy titbits? We’ll be risking our lives out there and we need to make choices which reflect that reality. And frankly, I’d have thought your people would relish the appointment. I picked the only Omega-rated roboteer who’s from Earth. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Your alternative was Ash Corrigan-Five, from Drexler – the FPP’s favourite planet. You’re telling me you’d prefer that?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Zeke. ‘And honestly, the gesture did mean something, right up until it turned out that Ruiz was one of your people, not one of ours. The sects thought they’d won something at first, then they started to feel cheated. Now they need some kind of concession so they know you’re not trying to screw them over.’
‘What’s wrong with the House just doing its job?’ said Will. ‘The military positions on this mission were never open for debate. You’re supposed to be helping us source scientists.’
Zeke threw his hands open. ‘And that’s what I’m trying to do. But help me out here! I’m sympathetic to your needs, but you have to realise that the House Proportional is not like the senate. Most of the representatives know about the Tiwanaku Event now and they hate it. They’re all from Earth, of course, and to them this whole thing looks like an attempt to demonise Flags.
‘For the sects, an independent colony like the one the Reynard found out there isn’t a sin, it’s an inevitability. Sure, such things aren’t legal yet, but they expect that to change and they’re quietly furious that it hasn’t already. This event, though, makes it look like Earthers run around fomenting interspecies war. The sects need to feel like they’re a part of this process otherwise they’ll go it alone. I can think of at least three groups with Revivalist wings that could reach Tiwanaku easily. They have armies of Truist zealots just begging to recreate old glories. Any one of them could send a mission out while we sit here in bureaucratic hell.’
‘What about the fact that one of these groups of yours is probably the outfit that caused this situation in the first place?’ said Will.
‘Of course,’ said Zeke. ‘But what about the others? They’re not going to break ranks until they know who to blame. And they already hate the fact that you’re still ambassador. I’ve heard people calling you the Alien Satan again, which I haven’t heard for years. And the fact that you’re putting your own people in key positions only makes that worse. As far these people are concerned, Will, the Transcendist experiment failed years ago, back when the Transcended stopped talking. IPSO became a prison then, not a promise. They want Earth’s primacy back. For them, this just looks like another delay to their destiny.’
‘We’re already making compromises,’ said Pari. ‘We’re sourcing the diplomatic ship from the Vartian Institute rather than using one of our own, and we’ve reduced our contribution to the diplomatic team to a single strategic advisor.’
‘That doesn’t help much,’ said Zeke. ‘The Vartian Institute will insist on putting one of their own paranoid agents aboard, which only leaves three places to fill.’
‘Make them count, then,’ said Pari. ‘Who have you picked?’
‘Venetia Sharp is a definite,’ said Zeke.
Pari wrinkled her button nose. ‘The woman who wrote all that vitriol about the FPP?’
‘The same. But you can’t debate the fact that she’s an excellent scientist.’
Will said nothing. He’d read plenty of Venetia’s work and found it rock-solid.
‘As for the other two slots,’ said Zeke, ‘that’s where the Chesterfords come in. If you put Mark Ruiz in the captain’s seat, we want Yunus Chesterford to head up the diplomatic effort. He gets to be the public face of this mission, with executive command over that ship.’
Will fumed silently.
‘Come on,’ said Zeke. ‘You get what you want and Earth gets what it wants. It doesn’t cost you anything. We both know the mission will go from diplomatic to military the moment you
find out who pulled the stunt at Tiwanaku. When that happens, control of everything reverts back to you anyway. So what’s wrong with handing Earth the appearance of a victory?’
Zeke’s eyebrows rose optimistically as he waited for a response. Will just glared.
‘It’s not that simple,’ said Pari. ‘Yunus would have to explicitly hand off override control in the event of an emergency and he won’t be in a hurry to do that. If he thinks there’s an angle in it for Earth, he’ll just sit on his thumbs.’
‘What can I say?’ said Zeke. ‘I’ve managed things so far, but the alternative is that information about Mark’s background leaks a little further. It’s out of my hands at this point. Unless I can bring a compromise for the sects, they’ll act on that knowledge regardless of what line I ask them to take. As it is, we just need this one small concession to gain their silence.’
‘You realise that’s blackmail,’ said Pari.
‘I realise it’s business,’ said Zeke. ‘This mission is very high-stakes. What did you expect?’
‘Yunus Chesterford is a grandstanding idiot,’ said Will. ‘He’ll be worse than dead weight if anything serious happens.’
‘He’s a widely respected thought-leader on alien interactions,’ said Zeke. ‘And his wife is an award-winning exobiologist.’
Pari shook her head. ‘You’re on thin ice. All we have to do is swap the roles to put Ruiz in the subcaptain slot and your leverage evaporates. You won’t have a chance of pushing a leadership position for Chesterford then, and you’ll end up with a captain you like even less.’
‘Except that’s not going to happen, is it?’ said Zeke.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Pari. ‘We’re not ruling anything out.’
‘Fine,’ Will told Zeke. ‘You’ve got a deal.’
He could see where the negotiation was leading and he didn’t like it. If Earth wanted Chesterford to lead the mission, there were ways he could work around that. And after all, he’d be aboard a different ship. Plus the thought of inflicting Mark Ruiz on the Chesterfords gave him a certain perverse satisfaction.