by Adam Quinn
“Thank you, Mr. Keagan.” Gunther appeared discomforted by the exchange. “We shall contact you again if we require your services.”
“I eagerly await your communication.” The screen went dark.
“Well, that was an exercise in fantasy,” Harrison said. “We cannot go about hiring terrorists to help resolve our security issues.”
“I as well have reservations about the delegation of security duties to organizations not affiliated with our government,” Altez said. “Should they fail, our fleet would be put in a most uncomfortable position.”
Cherran did not like the way Harrison operated, but in this situation, ensuring that the control centers were actually destroyed before the fleet arrived was of paramount importance. Plus, with Harrison and Altez on his side, he saw a clear path to a majority in the Cabinet. “I concur. We should move forward with the plan formed of the combination of Mr. Harrison’s ideas and my own, without enlisting the Jacobins.”
“I still believe in the Jacobins,” Gunther said, “but the plan of Messrs. DeGuavra and Harrison is acceptable as well.”
Cherran knew that was Gunther’s way of signaling that, despite his legal power to do otherwise, he would acquiesce to the Cabinet’s wishes—unsurprising, as he had spent his entire presidency building a precedent of seeking consensus within the Cabinet. Cherran was eager to reach a vote, but the re-emergence of the possibility of involving the Jacobins reminded him of another possibility that was discussed in the last Cabinet meeting but was conspicuously absent now. “What about the weapon? Sending it would vastly increase the deterrent, as well as our chance of victory if it came down to it.”
Altez and Gunther exchanged glances.
“Cherran, we appreciate that,” Gunther said, “but we will not be sending the weapon for strategic reasons.”
“All right.” Cherran frowned; it made sense to hold the weapon in reserve, but he had no doubt it could make short work of the Kaleknarian fleet at Trascion. Still, with any luck there would not be a battle to win at all, so he decided not to press the point.
Gunther moved on quickly. “Mr. Harrison, is your special operations asset prepared to carry out this mission, should we choose to order it?”
“Unfortunately, I need to resupply them first,” Harrison said. “They just finished with a different operation. However, you should not need to delay more than a few days; my resupply ship can be ready to launch by tomorrow afternoon, and it is a good deal faster than standard fleet speed.”
“Do so,” Gunther said.
“I still do not like this idea at all,” Health said. “If Mr. Harrison fails, or if the Kaleknarians are more hawkish than expected, sending in a fleet is the quickest way to turn this crisis into a shooting war.”
“I am confident in my assets,” Harrison said.
“In the end,” Resources said, “our only two options are Trascionese liberty or war. Ceding such a strategically vital world to the Kaleknarians is suicide. Better to know how everyone stands now than a few months down the road when Trascion is more heavily fortified and pumping out trascionite for the Kaleknarian war machine.”
“Another good point,” Gunther said.
“Yet not sufficient,” Economy said. “We cannot gamble the galaxy on a few questionable inferences about the Kaleknarian government.”
“Do you think the Kaleknarian ambassador was randomly murdered a few hours before he was going to turn over valuable information to me?” Cherran realized he was clenching his fists underneath the table and relaxed them. Pulling off this diplomatic maneuver was important, but there was no sense in getting upset at people who disagreed with him and a lot of sense in not doing so. Percival DeGuavra did not overcome the GG by shouting people down.
“No,” Economy said, “but what if he was a lone dissident in an otherwise hawkish empire?”
“Then peace never had any chance at all,” Altez said.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Gunther raised his arms. “Please. I know this is a difficult issue, but our time is limited, and our attention is needed elsewhere. Let us take a vote.”
Health slumped back in her seat, a resigned look coming across her face. Cherran tried to shoot her a reassuring smile, but she turned away from him. Cherran winced, but he was not doing this for her. He was doing it for peace—and for Shuping and his dad. And maybe a little bit for Gerald.
“All in favor of the plan proposed by Cherran and Mr. Harrison?” Gunther raised his own finger, apparently conceding that his Jacobin idea would not pass.
“And all opposed?”
Only Economy and Health raised their hands.
The “yea” votes of Gunther, Altez, Harrison, Cherran, and Resources constituted a resounding show of support for the plan.
“Excellent,” Gunther said. “Mr. Altez, I assume our fleet is ready?”
“It is in formation over Meltia—the Meltian Republic 6th Fleet.”
“Who is leading it?”
“Admiral Lauderheist.”
“From the Battle of Meltia? A good choice.”
A good choice for fighting a battle, but not for conducting a negotiation.
“I would like to accompany him,” Cherran said. It was an impulsive decision, but he knew as soon as he made it that it was the right one. Nobody else in the Republic worked with the Kaleknarians the way he did, and considering how risky this plan was all by itself, to send an underqualified diplomat would be to doom the whole enterprise.
“Cherran?” Gunther turned his way, evidently surprised.
“I have more experience talking to Kaleknarians than anyone else in the Cabinet,” Cherran said. “Mr. Gunther, if you want somebody to talk the Kaleknarians down, I’m your best bet. I made this plan up; I should see it through.”
“Then I think we would be remiss not to send you,” Gunther said.
As Taylor led her group across the parking area under the James Resal Hospital, she slowed until she was shoulder-to-shoulder with Hezekiah. The close distance was slightly uncomfortable, but she had to set something straight. “You’re on board with this, right?”
Brook had seemed to relish the law-skirting inherent in Marissa and Taylor’s plan, while JP was open about his reservations, but she expected that from them. Hezekiah, on the other hand, had agreed far quicker than she thought he would.
“Certainly,” Hezekiah said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You seem…” Taylor grasped for a word. “Principled. Like you might take offense to us taking MRSIS property and consorting with a black market doctor.”
“You’re confusing principles for laws,” Hezekiah said. “Intelligent species are created with great potential for both good and evil, which is why we need principles to guide us in the direction of diligence and compassion. Those principles are not always paralleled by the laws we create.”
“By ‘created,’ you mean we convergently evolved intelligence, right?” Taylor agreed with everything Hezekiah said, but the way he phrased it was uncomfortably reminiscent of one of the deceased religions of the Earth Age—or the Kaleknarian theocracy.
“Of course,” Hezekiah said.
Before Taylor could question him further, she spotted Marissa and her still-silent friend waiting the near the same elevator door as last time.
“Good morning, Marissa,” Taylor said. “Did you watch Mantradome’s latest speech?”
“No,” Marissa said.
Taylor was wearing her Newface, which Marissa’s friend had never seen before, but if she was confused, she did not say anything. She did not say anything in general.
“Well, you didn’t miss much,” Taylor said. It had been another barely-coherent xenophobic spiel. This time, Mantradome did not even threaten another attack, which Taylor hoped was a sign that Treaty Day had weakened the Alliance, but she knew that with a leader as unstable as Mantradome, it was no guarantee.
“I do have something for you, though.” Marissa tossed a small personal screen to Taylor.
&
nbsp; “Oh?” Taylor held the screen up for her team to see. It displayed an image of a starship that appeared to be a carrier at heart, but which had so many patches of different material, auxiliary weapons, and in a few cases what looked like smaller starships bolted onto it that it hardly deserved that designation anymore.
“What in the galaxy is that thing?” Brook asked.
“Meltian Guard footage of what appears to be the Alliance’s mobile base,” Marissa said. “The base ship is the GGS Porcelain, which was destroyed in the war.”
“I guess these people patched it back together,” Brook said.
“Yes,” Marissa said. “More importantly, it evaded the Meltian Guard by using a dual-spun flip drive.”
“What’s that?” Taylor asked.
“It’s a flip drive with two simultaneously powered dimensional transformers that can be mechanically swapped,” Hezekiah said.
She gave him a blank look.
“They can flip into a system and then flip back out without waiting for their flip drive to warm up again,” he said.
“Ah,” Taylor said. “That sounds useful.”
“It could change space warfare dramatically once it is fully deployed,” Hezekiah said, “but at the moment there’s only one company with the technical ability to make them—Griffin Space Technologies.”
“The evidence mounts,” Brook said.
An elevator car arrived, and all six of them piled in.
“Right,” Taylor said, “but we don’t need to prosecute Griffin any more—I mean, somebody should, but now, with this terrorist, we have a direct lead on the Alliance itself.”
“I don’t understand why we needed to steal a terrorist in the first place,” JP said. “We have an MRSIS agent on our side. Is that not sufficient?”
“I thought it was,” Taylor said, “but apparently there are things within the MRSIS that Marissa cannot access.”
“The MRSIS is highly secretive, even within itself,” Marissa said. “What you know is directly proportional to how much Harrison trusts you, and unfortunately, Harrison is very good at picking who he trusts. As someone who effectively got grandfathered into the organization from the Galactic Resistance, I’m on the lowest level of trust.”
The elevator door opened, and Marissa’s friend led the way out into the hall. Medical personnel rushed back and forth, and Taylor’s group tried to stay out of the way as much as possible. Seeing as James Resal was the closest hospital to TKG Headquarters, Taylor imagined they had their hands full caring for Treaty Day Attack survivors.
“I also don’t understand why you think this terrorist will give us anything at all,” JP said. “They don’t seem to be terribly cooperative people.”
“He wasn’t until this morning,” Marissa said. “When I came in, my friend and I took the little metal bit on his forehead apart, and Taylor, you were right, it’s some kind of FSO transceiver, like an uplink implant. We’re not actually sure how it works, but we made sure it stopped working before we woke him up. When we did, he seemed willing enough to work with us. We think the Alliance might have used it to exert control over him, though we didn’t see any mechanism for terminating him like a Kaleknarian collaborator would have. We didn’t get much of a chance to talk before you arrived, but I think he’ll help us now.”
“Unless it’s a charade,” Taylor said.
“Could be—that’s what we need to figure out first,” Marissa said. “Anyway, here we are.”
On the outside, Trauma Room Four looked like every other room in the James Resal Hospital: a simple keyless sliding door painted, like the walls around it, in inoffensive blue and white pastels.
On the inside, four blue-armored TKG soldiers stood guard over the Alliance terrorist Taylor had brought to the hospital, who was lying on a padded angled surface. The man’s wrists, ankles, and waist were secured by metal bands that looked like they had been installed quickly and ad-hoc on the surface. His head was surrounded by a wire mesh that supported a number of scanners connected to an array of readouts on a cart next to him.
Taylor expected to have to restrain herself from lashing out at the terrorist, but no such urge seized her. Between the unisex gown around his body and the white bandage concealing whatever was left of his implant, nothing said “child-murderer” about him.
His gaze swept listlessly over Taylor’s group as they entered, his expression that of a condemned man. “I’m so sorry.”
That sent Taylor’s nails biting into her palms. “‘Sorry’ isn’t nearly good enough.”
“I know,” the man said. “I don’t remember all that they used my body for—I don’t really want to remember—but I know an apology doesn’t cut it.”
Taylor felt a certain sympathy for the man in spite of herself—a sympathy she quickly suppressed. For all they knew, this guy was a loyal Alliance thug trying to infiltrate their little group for his masters.
Taylor fixed him with a glare. “‘Used your body’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The man’s eyes seemed to regain some of their focus, fixing on Taylor. “They… took control of my body. To some extent, my mind as well. At first, I could watch… see what they were doing with me, but after a while, I began to lose that ability, that connection to the outside world. They were completely in control.”
“Not like the Kaleknarians’ collaborators, then?” JP asked.
“No.” The man shook his head violently. “The collaborators are threatened with reprisal if they do not comply. I could not choose whether to comply at all. Anything they instructed, my body performed, like a robot. They tested their control over…”
The man came to a stop, blinking rapidly as tears glistened in his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
JP folded his arms. “Sounds like a flawless legal defense. How do we know he’s telling the truth?”
“We don’t—not for sure.” Marissa’s friend said in possibly the first five words Taylor had ever heard her speak. She turned to the scanner readouts on the cart. “We’re monitoring brain function, but his brain is put together differently than that of any other human I’ve ever seen. I can try to gauge if he’s making things up based on whether he’s showing creative or recollective brain signatures, but I can’t guarantee accuracy.”
“Give it your best shot,” Brook said.
“We should start out with something simple,” Hezekiah said.
“What is your name?” Taylor asked.
“Saifan Lodi,” he said.
“Almost certainly true,” Marissa’s friend said.
“How long were you with the Alliance?” JP asked.
Saifan squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “My memories are… sparse. What year is it?”
“11,810 ST,” JP said.
Saifan looked shocked. “Six years. They stole six flipping years of my life, and they would have taken the rest, too.”
“Probably truth,” Marissa’s friend said.
“How did you get involved with the Alliance?” Brook asked.
Saifan winced a little. “I’m not going to hide anything from you, even though you might not like it. I fought for the GG during the Order War, as a Cavalieri. After we lost, I resented Meltia, but I decided to settle down in the Liberated Territories… until six years ago when someone I knew from the Order War approached me saying that they were building an army to reinstate the GG and needed Cavalieri. I doubted him at first, but then I found out it was led by GG Commander Mantradome. She had a reputation as a borderline-sociopath even before the GG fell, and I figured if anyone would try something like that, it would be her. By the time I realized what they actually wanted me for, they were already knocking me out and converting me into their slave.”
“So this Mantradome character is a human xenophobe and pro-GG?” Brook asked.
“She did say in her first speech that the Order War was unjust,” Taylor said.
“The Galactic Government was the most multicultural organization to ever exist in the hist
ory of the galaxy,” JP said. “Literally every species of intelligent life in the galaxy was to some extent a part of it. Hardly the triumph of a xenophobe.”
“I don’t think she’s trying to be consistent,” Taylor said. “It seems like she’s picking and choosing positions pragmatically. She knew Saifan and others would be receptive to calls to restore the GG, so she adopted that. Now, with the Human Race and all, xenophobia looks like a good route to power, so she’s adopting it.”
“To what end is she gathering power?” Brook asked.
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Maybe for its own sake. I remember Mantradome before the war—even when she was a GG commander, she was never particularly stable, and she lost a lot of power when the GG was defeated.”
“All very interesting,” Hezekiah said, “but I feel like what’s more important right now is that Saifan, by his own admission, wished we lost the Order War so badly that he followed a sociopath into battle to reinstate the GG. Saifan, why in the galaxy should we trust you now?”
“Because I don’t care about that anymore.” The last of Saifan’s weary despair vanished from his eyes, transmuting into a fiery look that Taylor suspected was not intended for her or her friends. “Once the Alliance got me, they performed some procedure on my brain that removed most of my telekinesis, but enhanced my ability to manipulate heat energy, and then put in my implant, which allowed them to control my body remotely from computers aboard the Frankenstein. They called the whole package ‘Project Firestorm,’ and their final test—to ensure that they had complete control over me—was to capture my parents and my brother… and to make me kill them.”
Saifan’s limbs shook within their restraints.
“Truth,” Marissa’s friend said.
“I don’t care what you think about my politics,” Saifan said, “but trust me when I say that I love my family and my own free will more than any government, and until Mantradome is dead and the Frankenstein is a burning husk, anyone in this galaxy who will help me bring them down is my unconditional ally.”
“Extreme emotion; truth,” Marissa’s friend said.
Taylor hardly needed the machines to tell her that. What Saifan described was dramatic, but all too in-character for the Alliance, and it was hard to imagine this man sitting before her was so cynical as to place his political fantasies above the lives of his family members, not to mention a professional liar to pass it off as genuine.