Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy)

by Adam Quinn

  “So, General McHue,” Keagan prompted, “beyond old times’ sake…”

  Dane was a general? Clearly rank conferred less distinction among the Jacobins than Taylor was used to—admittedly, Taylor didn’t insist on being called “Admiral Ghatzi,” but that was because she was not proud of how she’d earned that rank.

  “Yes, right, of course!” Dane turned back and forth a few times before his eyes fell on the personal screen he was still holding. “Ah! Taylor, Mars has conferred to me how you’d like to help us out with our crayfish problem, and I must say, I’m very grateful for that, especially considering the opportune time of your arrival.”

  Taylor was about to ask what he meant by “opportune” when Dane thrust his screen toward her, a recording of a Telahmir Report broadcast already playing. On screen, a man in a Meltian military uniform stood behind a podium emblazoned with Meltia’s torch emblem. A banner at the bottom of the screen identified him as Commander-in-Chief of the Meltian Guard Tibaux Altez.

  An indistinct bout of shouting went up from the off-screen audience.

  “Merci, merci.” Altez raised his arms to calm the crowd. “I have nothing but a short declaration for you, the citizenry of the Meltian Republic, as well as our friends abroad, and most importantly our adversaries. It is this: that the Meltian Republic has no affection for war, and to the contrary will endure many sufferances and indignities to preserve a state of peace. That spoken, construe our endurance as meekness at your own grave peril, for when the liberty of our allies is threatened, and when the unilateral use of force by our neighbors renders that state of peace wholly insupportable, we will not falter. It is for these reasons that the 6th fleet of the Meltian Republic is currently underway to the troubled Trascionese solar system, to whose liberty our dedication is unshakable. It is the disposition of the Kaleknarian Empire alone which will determine whether this encounter ends in conflict, as our own is here laid plain.”

  The crowd exploded into applause, and the screen cut to a Rosarian woman in the Telahmir Report’s studio. “The TSX Composite rallied in the—”

  Dane paused the video, and Taylor felt a cold trickle of dread. She already knew, of course, that the Kaleknarian occupation of Trascion could lead to a war—she had brought it up herself as one of the reasons Trascion needed to figure prominently in her team’s plans—but somehow hearing it out of the mouth of Altez, one of the most powerful men in the galaxy, made it seem more real. More likely. Yet, when she checked the faces of her two Jacobin hosts, they did not seem to share her concern. In fact, Dane reminded her of Ciro’s mua’er in her dream, holding out the personal screen with an expectant smile on his face.

  Between a brain-devouring FSO transceiver and a Meltian-Kaleknarian war, Taylor did not know which “gift” she would run away from quicker.

  “Well.” Taylor kept her tone guarded—she still wanted the Jacobins’ support. “I’m not sure I’d characterize that as ‘opportune.’”

  Dane gave her a small frown. “Taylor, Mars and I, and the Jacobin division we have here have been fighting an uphill battle; we were able to get food and water to a lot of people, sure, and every once in a while we shot down a crayfish patrol, but we could never feed a tenth of the population, and collaborators just kept pouring into the enemy fold, but now it seems like we could make a difference—our forces aren’t that impressive, but we’ve been watching the crayfish since they touched down, and we could cause some real trouble down here that’d keep them distracted from Altez’s fleet, and maybe even make them think twice about occupying this rock.”

  “No.” Taylor instinctively seized Dane’s wrist. “No, no, no. Dane, believe me, I think the Kaleknarians are a scourge on this galaxy as much as anyone else, but we can’t risk unleashing another galactic war to get rid of them.”

  Taylor acknowledged that she had been wrong—painfully wrong—about what was necessary to prevent a galactic war, and to what extent she was culpable for the last one, but none of that changed the basic fact that such a war should be avoided.

  “The Order War was started for similar reasons,” Keagan said.

  “Right, and the Order War did not work,” Taylor said. “Unless the actual goal was to kill hundreds of billions of people and deprive trillions more of their homes and livelihoods. Sure, we got rid of the GG, but now a quarter of the galaxy is ruled by a government more repressive than the GG ever was!”

  “And now we can help free that quarter,” Dane said. “The odds are much better this time around, especially if Selecia and the CDW join in, as we suspect they will.”

  “Fine,” Taylor said. “Best case scenario: you somehow align all the other powers in a grand anti-Kaleknarian coalition, and take out the Kaleknarian government, killing a couple hundred billion people in the process. Then what—do all of Kaleknar’s worlds go to Meltia? They will be dealing with Kaleknarian insurgents for years, then, giving Harrison even more ammunition for his quest to expand the MRSIS’s influence. Are the victors going to divvy up the spoils? Can you tell me with a straight face that the powers whose greatest diplomatic success is PanGal will be able to do that well? What happens when someone—Harrison, perhaps—decides that diplomacy is too slow? Even if you’re willing to accept the enormous body count, there is no way this works out for you!”

  Taylor’s body was so tense she felt like she was vibrating. She tried to relax, but the very idea that someone who had lived through the Order War just like her now wanted to submit the galaxy to that kind of suffering again—even for a goal as noble as fighting the Kaleknarian Empire—was toxic to her.

  “We know that lives will be lost taking down the crayfish,” Dane said, “but lives—and liberties—are lost every day they remain in power, and sure, you can make some pretty cynical predictions about the course of history, but we believe that, given the chance, freedom and justice will prevail.”

  “And what if you’re wrong?” Taylor asked.

  Dane nodded slowly, eyes locked with Taylor’s own, but she held no illusions that he was reconsidering his position. There was a spark in his eyes of hope that was so groundless, it was unquenchable. In a perverse way, it reminded her of the Kaleknarians’ religion, but instead of faith in a xenophobic deity, the Jacobins had faith in their political vision that if they just fought this one war and defeated this one empire, peace and freedom would reign over the galaxy.

  “Taylor, I want you to see some things before you reject us out of hand.” Dane turned to Keagan. “Mars, tell the hangar boys to fire up a hovercar.”

  “Yes, sir.” Keagan departed down the bronze staircase. Taylor was still unsure what his rank or position was, but it clearly was not any higher than Dane’s.

  “If you don’t mind, of course,” Dane said.

  “Not at all.” There was no doubt in Taylor’s mind at this point that she could not let the Jacobins go through with whatever scheme they had, but how she was going to go about stopping them was still unclear.

  The Jacobins’ hangar—what Taylor figured used to be the production floor of the factory—was even more convoluted than Telahmir Command, but Dane navigated it with ease, picking out a hovercar that might once have been sleek silver, but was now covered in splotches of various shades of gray. He took the driver’s seat while she slid into the passenger’s, and in a few moments, they were gliding out of the hangar. Not soaring, but gliding barely a meter off the ground. They quickly slipped through the Jacobins’ holographic camouflage and into the city beyond. The Trascionese star had now slipped completely out of view, leaving traces of orange along the horizon as the only evidence of its passage.

  “You were concerned about the cost of a war with the crayfish,” Dane said, “so I wanted to tell you a little story, one that’s played out, oh, a few thousand times across the galaxy, most recently on Trascion.”

  All the buildings around the Jacobin base were intact, save for broken windows and smashed-in doors, but after a moment, they began to find entire swathes of the ci
ty that were reduced to ash and rubble. Dane flew a little quicker through these sections, possibly because they held no cover for the hovercar.

  “This story starts when a crayfish battle fleet flips into orbit,” Dane said. “The militia scrambles, of course, and they fight valiantly, but all they can do is buy time, and the planetary government invariably surrenders or goes into hiding within hours, leaving the planet virtually defenseless.”

  They drew closer to the center of the city, and Taylor could barely make out a silvery structure towering over bombed-out buildings at its heart, but Dane turned away before they could get close to it.

  “The crayfish word for the next stage is very difficult to pronounce,” Dane said, “but it roughly translates to ‘scouring’—government buildings, food and water supplies, transportation infrastructure, emergency services, major population centers—everything needed to physically support the population is hit from orbit, and then the crayfish come down in person to loot our sear guns and our vehicles, and they don’t get everything, clearly, but they hit all the armories and gun shops and hovervehicle dealerships, leaving us to pick up the scraps.”

  “Do any of them stay down here?” Taylor glanced back in the direction of the silvery structure, remembering Dane’s earlier statement that the Jacobins’ plan was to cause trouble “down here” to distract the Kaleknarians.

  “Some of them,” Dane said, “including the religious leader of the whole crayfish occupational force—he’s a hothuxix, you know, which is basically the crayfish old guard; the military leader of the force is supposed to be a bit more liberal—by crayfish standards, that is—but this guy, well suffice it to say the reason he came down was so he could personally oversee the subjugation of all of us heathens.”

  Which probably also meant the military leader was far more likely to back down in the face of the 6th fleet than his hothuxix counterpart. Maybe if there were some way to remove this religious leader from play, it would increase the Kaleknarians’ chances of backing down. The Jacobins might even agree—Taylor got the sense that they did not desire war so much as believed war was the only way to ensure Trascionese liberty. “Is there any way we could raid the hothuxix leader’s base?”

  Dane shook his head. “It’s locked up tight—if we could breach it with our resources, he’d already be dead.”

  Their hovercar approached the limits of the city, and evidence of habitation began to appear, from pathways cleared through the rubble to the occasional light shining from a window.

  “Like I said, when they finished with the scouring, some of the crayfish came down, and they set up their facilities at the heart of Trascion’s cities, just to show that they could, and anyone who owned a ship with a flip drive tried to escape—though the crayfish shot a lot of those down before they could leave the atmosphere—and anyone who didn’t own a ship fled to the outskirts of the city, where they were less likely to become opportunity targets; the Jacobins have been doing our best to feed, clothe, and arm these people, but many continue to choose to become collaborators, and we can hardly blame them.” Dane turned toward Taylor, a sly grin on his face. “Might turn out to benefit us, though, because as I said, we’ve been watching the crayfish since they landed, so we know where all the control centers are that watch over those collaborators—our plan’s to hit a handful of them just as your 6th fleet arrives, and thereby liberate a couple million people who have every reason in the galaxy to hate the crayfish.”

  Taylor nodded, taking in the plan. “Are there any collaborators inside the hothuxix leader’s base? Is there any chance that destroying one of the control centers could liberate them, and they could help us get to him?”

  Dane shook his head again. “Hothuxix don’t care much for collaborators—I told you, if there were any way for us to get to him, we would have already done it.”

  “Hm.” Taylor gazed out the window. At least Dane was open to her suggestions. If she could come up with some brilliant plan to get the Kaleknarians to back down peacefully, she had a feeling that she could sell it to him, but so far, her only idea was going after the hothuxix leader, and that seemed increasingly improbable. An orbital strike from the Meltian fleet ought to clear him out, but she had a feeling that would be seen as an act of war by itself.

  Just as their hovercar was about to pass a jagged hole in the street, Dane wrenched the controls hard to the right, and they dove underground into some kind of tunnel much more extensive than suggested by the hole through which they had entered. Taylor squinted—the tunnel was even darker than the twilight above ground, but the bottom was at least tolerably lit by warm light pouring out of the multitude of shacks and lean-tos that lined its sides. People moved between and past these crude structures, some with a purpose, while others simply wandered. Most paused as the hovercar glided overhead, either to enthusiastically wave or to fix it with a cold stare. It was clear whom the Jacobins had been able to help.

  “We don’t waste manpower running surveys down here,” Dane said, “but we know that the vast majority of these people are living on whatever food they carried out of their home or stole from somebody else’s, and when that dries up, they’ll either starve to death or become collaborators, so one way or the other, this community will be gone in a few more weeks if the crayfish don’t go first. These are the people we need your help to save.”

  Taylor bit her lip. It was wrong to leave these people to the Kaleknarians, but that did not make starting a war right. There had to be a third option—some way to remove that old guard religious leader and ensure that the Kaleknarians backed down when Altez arrived. Oh, and at some point, she also had to figure out how to rescue Marissa and stop the Alliance.

  Taylor shook her head—one problem at a time. The Jacobins didn’t have the physical ability to strike at the hothuxix base, the 6th fleet did not have the political capacity to do so, and the only other armed force in the solar system was the Kaleknarians themselves.

  Then again, that wasn’t quite true. Taylor blinked. The answer was as obvious as it was completely insane.

  “The Alliance.”

  “What?” Dane glanced at her as they returned to the surface.

  A plan crazy enough to make Captain Brook blush fell together in Taylor’s mind. “Harrison’s been using the Alliance as an asset to carry out his dirty work with plausible deniability for who knows how long. What if we—my team, that is—liberated their ship, and then used it to strike the hothuxix leader’s base from orbit? Then the Meltian fleet could flip in and open fire on us as a show of goodwill toward the Kaleknarians. That would leave the more liberal Kaleknarian leader to negotiate with the fleet, which has just helped him deal with a terrorist threat—an excellent atmosphere for negotiations—and even if those negotiations broke down anyway, assassinating that leader would cause a lot more confusion than hitting a few control centers, making it even easier for the Meltians to emerge victorious.”

  Plus Taylor would be able to rescue Marissa, defeat the Alliance, and turn the Frankenstein over to the Meltian Republic.

  “Huh.” Dane kept his eyes on the road, which was now lit only by starlight. Taylor could not tell if he was thinking over her proposal or merely concentrating on getting them back to Trascion Command until he said, “I like it, but as I understand it, your last attempt to, ah, liberate their ship ended suboptimally.”

  “Suboptimally” was a generous way to put it. But this time, there might be a way to circumvent the hostile boarding step, which was where the plan had fallen apart last time. “True, but this time I think I might be able to get a little help from a very powerful person named Ryan Harrison.”

  They were getting close to Trascion Command now. Dane shot her an incredulous look. “Didn’t you say Harrison was using the Alliance? And why would he help you anyway?”

  “Because I have something that he wants,” Taylor said. “You.”

  This time Dane’s look was a mixture of confusion and concern. “You’re not going to—” />
  “In exchange for Harrison’s assistance, I’ll tell him everything I know about where to find the Jacobins,” Taylor said, “which is mainly that they have a base in an abandoned Wavemod Enterprises facility in a certain Trascionese city. If it just so happens that the base I describe is evacuated before Harrison’s thugs arrive, well then I can’t do anything about that, now can I?”

  “Oh,” Dane said. “Oh. And I suppose we’ll leave just enough weapons and other memorabilia lying around that Harrison believes it was recently our base, we just abandoned it.”

  “Precisely,” Taylor said. “And at the same time, since you’ve been fighting the Kaleknarians, this will look like just another show of goodwill toward them.”

  Dane snapped his fingers together. “And what if we sent out a broadcast to the Kaleknarians saying that we had taken over the Alliance’s mothership, so Harrison’s ‘raid’ of our base is not just a random event, but rather a retaliation against the people who just struck the planet from orbit? Even more goodwill.”

  “Sure.” Taylor smiled. She was not sure how much of a difference it would make whether the Kaleknarians thought the Alliance or the Jacobins were the ones to strike them, but she was happy to add Dane’s idea if it made him more enthusiastic about the plan.

  Their hovercar slipped back through the Jacobins’ holographic disguise and into their hangar, where Keagan was waiting for them. Dane and Taylor disembarked.

  “We’ve got a new plan, Mars—and it’s even better than the old one,” Dane said. “I knew Taylor was going to help us out!”

  “Actually,” Keagan said, “I’m here to show Ms. Ghatzi back to her team.”

  “Of course, yes, right,” Dane said. “But I do want to tell you about it. And everyone.”

  “Soon,” Keagan said. “Let’s go, Ms. Ghatzi.”

  Most of Trascion Command was even quieter than it had been when Taylor left, though she now heard snores emanating from a few of the building’s offices, which the Jacobins must have turned into sleeping areas. Taylor felt an urge to lay down as well, despite the fact that, by her body clock, it was barely the middle of the day. Which reminded her that she was also incredibly hungry. Funny how such things tended to suppress themselves when one was fighting or discussing matters of life and death.