by Ryk E. Spoor
She swallowed, and there was suddenly a hand on her arm.
Simon looked into her eyes. “It’s all right, Ariane. We’re all behind you.” The brilliant green eyes were filled with absolute confidence, a certainty that she desperately needed.
“You’re sure, Simon?” she asked softly.
“We’re all sure, Captain,” DuQuesne said, now on her other side, his ebony gaze reinforcing Simon’s with calm and massive competence. “Now you have to be. I know you’re wondering, again, if you’re really right about all this—”
“— but that’s pretty much why we’re sure you are,” Gabrielle said emphatically. “So long as you’re still doubtin’ yourself sometimes, you’ll still be who you are—and that’s who we need.”
“PRECISELY CORRECT, GABRIELLE WOLFE OF TELLUS,” thundered a familiar voice. “IT IS THE ESSENCE OF WHO SHE IS THAT MAKES ARIANE AUSTIN THE CORRECT CHOICE FOR THIS MOST VITAL OF TASKS.”
“Mentor?” Despite the support of all her friends—and all very dear to me now—there was no voice in the universe she wanted to hear more right now. “Where—”
Look to your right, next to the doorframe, the voice spoke with subdued power through her short-range link. It was clear within my Visualization that you would use this pathway, and therefore arranged to have my case placed here.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you!” Ariane reached down and picked up the case that had accompanied her for most of her adult life—and quite a few years before. As Mentor’s case clicked into place on her belt, she felt everything else click into place as well. I don’t want to see us go the way of the Blessed…but having constant companions like Mentor is not something I want us to give up, either.
“Okay, everyone. I’m ready.” She took a deep breath, glanced around, and strode forward, DuQuesne and Simon flanking her, Gabrielle in the middle, and Oasis and Wu bringing up the rear.
The Council Chamber doors slid open. The woman speaking—representative of Mars, I think—suddenly stopped, and a hush fell over the entire assembly.
“Pardon me, Mr. Chairman,” Ariane said, and heard her voice amplified around the room. Good work, Mentor.
I am in fact being assisted by Vincent and Mio. Excellent partners.
Then good work to all of you.
Saul Maginot stood slowly. “We had expected Ambassador Naraj…” he began. She could see a twinkle in his eyes that said, as clearly as though he’d spoken, but you’re what I was hoping for.
“I apologize for misleading you,” she said, deliberately injecting barely any apologetic tone into the statement. “But I had, and have, reason to prefer to speak without any opportunity for anyone else to prepare. Mentor,” she raised her voice slightly, “is the Council secure?”
“IT IS SECURE,” Mentor replied, shaking the room with the three words.
“Good. No transmissions out, no transmissions in. And since these councils are now almost all face-to-face, I believe that still gives me the opportunity to speak to most of you.”
“Sealed off…what the hell do you think you’re doing, Captain Austin?” demanded a woman with green and blue hair and the bearing of a military officer. General Jill Esterhauer, formerly head of Inner System Security, now Earth Defense Force coordinator, Mentor informed her. Ariane remembered her vaguely—she’d commented on the need for patrols above the Upper Sphere, as Ariane recalled, back in that first meeting after their return.
“Correcting a mistake I made some time ago, General,” Ariane answered. She strode to the central podium; she could see the speaker from Mars briefly consider arguing with her, then immediately changing her mind. The others stayed back a ways, except for Wu, who followed her like a brightly-colored shadow.
“A…mistake, Captain?” Dean Stout asked mildly.
“A mistake that very nearly cost us…possibly everything, Councillor.”
She looked around slowly at the hundred or so faces—many curious, some amused, several angry, others…cautious. Then she set her jaw. Here we go.
“A few weeks ago, I was kidnapped by the Blessed to Serve.”
The council stared at her blankly for a moment, then murmurs began to grow into shouts.
“QUIET!”
The shout shook the walls, echoed around the room three times, and only slowly faded; in the momentary silence, she thought she heard a slight chuckle from Wu Kung. “I expect I’ll be answering all your questions eventually. But I’m telling this my way, and you are all going to listen—because a hell of a lot depends on it.
“Yes, I was kidnapped. Right off the Docks, into one of their flagships, and on course to travel straight to their homeworld, where the best I could hope for would be death. Fortunately,” she let her first, very nasty, smile out, “that didn’t quite work out the way they planned.
“But the worst part of that was that it wasn’t the Blessed who had planned it all. That was done—as some of you in this room already know—by Deputy Ambassador Michelle Ni Deng.”
“My God!” Saul said involuntarily. “Are you—”
“I am not merely sure, Commander Maginot, I have absolute proof; records from the Blessed themselves tracing her negotiations with Vantak, then the second in command of the Blessed, and her attempt to collect on the bargain with Sethrik—who had been kidnapped along with me because the Minds believed that he was no longer entirely reliable.”
The Council was now utterly silent; shock was written clearly on most faces, but a few seemed…wary. And maybe you should be.
“All the evidence will be delivered—along with Ni Deng herself—shortly,” she went on. “But I’m not here to discuss her crime, at least not right now.
“The problem is that in many ways this is my fault.”
One of the other Councillors—Jeremaiah Britt, CSF Logistics Division, Mentor noted for her—stirred at that. “I beg your pardon, Captain. How is this horrible event—assuming it is true—your fault?”
“Because I let you saddle me with an appointed pair of ambassadors in the first place,” she said grimly. “Because I let you shove me back into the Arena while you kept trying to do ‘business as usual’ here. Because—honestly? I really didn’t want to be running things and in my heart I was hoping something would just come along and make it so I didn’t have to.”
“Let us?” The outburst came from a indeterminately-gendered representative of Ganymede Colony identified by Mentor as White Camilla. “You may be designated head of Faction by this Arena—something which certainly does need to be changed—but here you are a thrill-racing pilot who’s never even—”
“That,” Ariane snapped, putting as much steel into her voice as possible, “is exactly the attitude I thought I’d get from some of you. And it’s going to get us all killed.”
Ariane shoved all her uncertainty back, focused, let her anger come forward, the fury she felt at the betrayal some of these people had known about, and took one more deep breath. And just as some of the others were about to speak, she allowed herself to cut loose.
“Yes, killed, wiped out, exterminated! You’ve seen the files, you’ve watched the simulations. The Molothos aren’t playing games out there. They’re not some sim villains you can turn off, and they’re not stuck in the Arena, either. They’re out there, somewhere not too far away—even by real-space standards.”
There was a murmur, and she put a faintly patronizing smile on her face. “Oh, some of you didn’t get that? They travelled through Arenaspace to our Sphere. They’ve colonized somewhere not too far away—maybe as close as Alpha Centauri.”
“Captain Austin,” said a respectful tenor voice; the speaker was a man with an impressive white-streaked beard—Political Simulation Director Robert Fenelon, Mentor informed her. “Captain,” he continued when she nodded, “while I am not terribly competent in the technical areas, my AISage informs me that our current wide-baseline imaging telescopes would be able to resolve objects down to a meter in size in systems that close. That would seem to
exclude the possibility of any significant installations in the Alpha Centauri system or, indeed, any relatively close systems at all.”
“Director Fenelon, that would be completely true if all else were equal; unfortunately, we have very good reason to believe things are not equal—some of which we discussed in the last major meeting I had with all of you. In short, we have evidence that the Arena’s reach is not entirely limited to Arenaspace.” Quickly she summarized DuQuesne’s prior observations and some of the other related facts they had learned. “So, honestly speaking, there is no reason to believe that we can trust our own telescopes much past the borders of our solar system, at least for things at the detail level of whether there’s people in the target systems.”
“It should be noted that this fits with the Arena’s basic modus operandi,” Simon spoke up. “There are numerous ways in which one can interpret the purpose of the Arena’s actions, but it is clear that one of the constant effects is to keep people separated in normal space, barring truly impressive efforts, and to force them to meet in the Arena. This also enforces that requirement; if you wish to find out if you have neighbors in your local stellar region, you either have to mount a fully manned expedition through normal space, or find your way to them through Arenaspace. The latter, though far from trivial or without danger, is still much easier than sending a major expedition across stellar distances at slower-than-light speeds.”
“Thank you, Simon,” she said. “Which leads us to this: it is in Arenaspace that we will almost certainly have our initial clash—and perhaps the majority of our battles will be fought there. And we are hideously outnumbered and outgunned. No one knows how many Spheres the Molothos control, but the number is certainly in the thousands—and that is full control. They are well-known for travelling through Arenaspace and colonizing the Upper Spheres of unclaimed systems—as they attempted to do to ours, before DuQuesne and Carl Edlund kicked them off. There is absolutely no firm guess as to how many Upper Spheres they currently have colonized, but it is probably in the tens of thousands—and each one of those is the equivalent of a planet the size of Earth. I don’t think we can even begin to understand the level of resources that represents.
“That doesn’t mean that it’s a hopeless cause. We have some advantages, and we’re already digging in. We have a significant number of Arena-designed warships already, lent to us by Orphan of the Liberated—and those designs are being looked over by the defense SFGs even as we speak. There are now orbital guard fortresses near each of the Sky Gates, and ground defenses being installed. We also are not without allies.
“BUT,” she raised her voice, and Mentor made it rumble around the room like thunder, “but there is one thing we absolutely cannot afford, and that is a division—a rift—between Arenaspace and our home solar system. I have no doubt that a lot of you have had the exact same sentiments as Representative Camilla—that I can go play toy boss off in this ‘Arena’ place, but otherwise I should let the professionals handle it.
“That’s not going to happen. Not any more.”
Saul stood slowly. “I beg your pardon, Captain?”
“I’m saying that I can’t—that humanity can’t—afford to have this division between who’s in charge, not when we’re staring straight into the claws of the Molothos—and who knows what else. So until such time as a good replacement, a damn good replacement, is available, I am going to be it. I am the Leader of the Faction of Humanity, and you are going to confirm that, and you are going to follow my lead, because this whole game’s played by the Arena’s rules. Even here, even in our home system. And by those rules, there is one Leader for this Faction, and you are looking at her.”
“That’s…preposterous,” Representative Camilla said, echoed by several others—a lot of the ones looking wary before. Ariane could see that Saul’s face was very guarded. He’s on our side, so he’s playing to the crowd. “You can’t declare yourself…ruler of Humanity.”
“I’m not the one doing the declaring,” she corrected. “The Arena decided I was the boss. And I spent time trying to get away from that—time that got me kidnapped and could have lost us more than you can imagine.
“I was damn tempted to give it up right there when I realized how badly I’d screwed up, but you know what? The person who’d replace me is someone you’d want less in that position. And—just by the way—the first thing you’re all going to do in confirming my position is to confirm my line of succession, so that if something happens to me, we’ll still have someone with a clue running things in the Arena.”
“Why should we do that at all?” General Esterhauer asked bluntly. “Why shouldn’t we simply declare someone else our Leader, if necessary?”
“Because it won’t work, unless you convince me to ratify your rules.” Ariane stared levelly into Esterhauer’s eyes. “And I’m not doing that, because what Oscar and Michelle showed me is that politicians from here don’t understand the stakes.”
She held up her hand. “That’s not meant as an insult. Most of you haven’t been to the Arena. All the recordings in the world aren’t going to make you get it. Even jumping over and visiting for a day is only going to start the process. Ambassador Naraj and Deputy Ambassador Ni Deng—they started out from the basic assumption that I simply wasn’t the right choice for the job, and everything they encountered in the Arena they viewed through that lens—a lens that assumes that you can play the same kind of politics there that you can here.
“But the truth? Earth and its solar system are some no-account backwater whose people have managed to surprise the hell out of the Arena’s residents—and piss off some of their worst. What happens here in normal space isn’t important in the Arena—but it’s damn important to us, because we haven’t got a thousand spheres and ten thousand colonies out there to waste. This is our homeworld.”
“And it’s the only Sphere we have,” General Esterhauer said bluntly. “Speaking theoretically—”
“Actually, that’s not true.”
The room went silent. Saul said, with a slowly dawning smile, “Captain Austin?”
“I mentioned that I was kidnapped. I did not describe precisely how I was rescued from that situation—and I’m not going to right now. But upon my return, I sent…an ultimatum to the Minds, the true Rulers of the Blessed. And they agreed completely to my terms. We are now at peace with the Blessed To Serve…and the human race now has three solar systems, three Spheres, to its name.”
For another moment there was silence. Then Representative Fenelon started to laugh. Saul joined him, and suddenly more than half the room resounded with triumphant, joyous laughter.
“An…impressive reversal of position,” Representative Camilla said as the laughter died away. “Especially for one who admits to having no experience as a negotiator. Still, I wonder then why we need to worry about these issues. As I understand it, we can close the Outer Gateway and the Straits and it doesn’t matter what sort of force the Molothos might bring, they cannot take the Inner Sphere and thus not our solar system. We could still travel to Nexus Arena, and through there to these other solar systems, whose location they have no idea of, and build up our forces there for many years. Why can we not, in essence, ignore this threat?”
DuQuesne looked about ready to explode, and she saw Wu Kung gritting his teeth so hard she was afraid they’d break, but Ariane held up her hand and shook her head ever so slightly to tell them No. Keep it under control. “Why? Three reasons, Representative.
“First, because that’s the coward’s approach. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but it bothers the hell out of me. And the Factions in the Arena value courage, style, and so on a very great deal. They think I’m more than half crazy, yes, but they also respect me, DuQuesne, Simon, Gabrielle, and the rest of us because we’ve met every challenge head-on and somehow come out of it alive.
“But that’s the least important. Second, since the Sky Gates are active, if we pretty much abandon the Upper Sphere, any invaders a
re going to get our sentry stations knocked out in short order—and then they can start dropping invasion forces into normal space. They’ll be about a light-year out, and we’ll have a bunch of nasty weapons to use on them…but they’ve been doing this for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years, and they can afford to send unending waves of assault craft at us. And don’t you think for a split second that they won’t. The Molothos made their attitude abundantly clear. If you haven’t seen what their response was to Ambassador Naraj when he tried to negotiate with them, you damn well better review it. Scares the living hell out of me every time I see it, and I knew what they were like from the moment I met them.
“But most importantly? Because even if that weren’t true, you still can’t run and hide from the Arena. The Arena isn’t going away. It’s already set the rules. It’s not stopped by turning your back.” She took the entire assembled SSC and CSF in with a single glance. “This room is sealed. The image projectors are off. So now you should watch me—very closely indeed.”
She focused, remembered the feeling, channeled it. These people…some of them went along with Ni Deng. Maybe even told her what to do. I was kidnapped! Simon was nearly killed, thousands of people died, all because of this stupid, irresponsible…
The tension built up…but it’s not happening! What happens if it doesn’t work?
For a moment she experienced a spurt of real panic, but that was exactly what she needed. Something within her drew tight, tighter, like a bowstring—
And there was a flare of golden light that enveloped her; she felt Kanzaki-Three beneath her vibrate, heard a bone-shaking chime…
And she was standing in midair, slowly descending, clothed in the uniform that had materialized about her in her first Awakening, in the moment she defeated Amas-Garao, midnight-blue with touches of gold, a ship-and-cup symbol shimmering on her breast. “You can’t turn your back,” she repeated softly, as her feet gradually came to rest on the floor again, “because the Arena will always be before you.”