by Stephen Moss
After what came next, if he was still alive, he would look for another sign. He would search the system for a specific anomaly, a sign that they had awoken on the other side, and were out and about. Doing what they must, readying for whatever came next.
For now, though, the plan was out of his hands. They had done all they could do. Something was coming, or rather they hoped it was. They could not know for certain. The different parts of their conspiracy were so widespread they spanned light years. But if the silence of the IST and the slowly resolving images of Earth had been any confirmation of the other half of their work’s success, then the next stage, the next landmark event in their war, should come any moment now.
And it would be any moment, as well. There would be no warning. They were just over two years out from Earth now. Two years. That would be the rough timeframe. They had known when they left that, if their Agent was successful, then by now the Earth would be furiously preparing, arming themselves and bracing for the coming fight. Preparations that, by the very nature of their required scale, would make themselves all too visible to an approaching Armada.
They were getting close now. Close enough that they were starting to catch glimpses of their goal from within the aura of its star, like a fighter pilot squinting up into the sun to try to glimpse their quarry, the Armada’s incredibly capable eyes were squinting as well as they focused on the growing brightness over the horizon of their long night, the dawn at the end of the last seven-year night of their epic journey.
They would be able to see sometime soon. They would be able to see what Earth had really been doing all these years while the IST sat silent. And when that happened, Kattel had to assume that all hell was going to break loose.
If hell’s hounds didn’t break out before then, of course.
And so he waited, going about his daily business while he thought about what was about to happen. Waited and walked. Waited and read. Waited and looked over interminable mission analytics. Waited and, one more time, tried to remember when he had agreed to do all this. When he had agreed to become involved in such an act of madness, such a leap of faith. And for what? For who? He shook his head.
He could only hope that the part of him, no, the version of him, that had gone ahead in the mind of the Agent known as John Hunt was not suffering such doubts, out there alone, on that alien planet, among that alien race.
Maybe, one day, if he himself survived the coming onslaught, he would find out what that other part of him had been up to on earth for all these years.
- - -
The chairman of Third Yalla walked into the Council meeting on foot. It was her turn as head of the Council, and she enjoyed a more traditional approach to proceedings than her fellow Council members. While it was her turn to set the stage for their meetings, she would bring a modicum of dignity and tradition to it all.
For starters, the Council members could not transpose directly into the space. Instead they arrived outside the main entrance, in something akin to an elevator, whose doors would then open onto the reception area to her virtual boardroom.
She smiled as she walked through the elaborate and beautiful vestibule. It was a mimicry of her own meeting area at her private hub off of Third Yalla, the homogeneous orbital ring built during the financial collapse of the formerly democratic nation of Yalla. Its construction had been funded by the generosity of the nation’s remaining elite, if only to house their own interests, and create a new state, their state, to be precise, far above the ruins of the old. It sat, quite literally, above First Yalla, from where it managed that nation’s diminished resources and interests, including its least valuable commodity, its people.
But that was all ancient history for the illustrious chairman of Third Yalla. She went by no other name anymore. She had fought long and hard to secure this position. She had used every ounce of leverage, political capital, and tactic she had known. And now she was to be the chairman of the newest Yallan corporate entity, the next evolution, a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent nation.
She had picked her team carefully. She had worked with the very best AM surrogates to craft the most loyal, most capable AM suite on Mobilius. Or anywhere, she supposed, smiling. And here was her handiwork in evidence, she thought, as she ran her hand along the burnished wood, a living tree, like the original back home, woven into the fabric of the room, manipulated on the physical and genetic level to become part of the space station’s very superstructure. Yes, thought the chairman, so close to the original. An extravagance she would see remade, on earth, when she ruled her very own slice of it.
She entered the long, lavishly appointed meeting room with a flourish of her long cloak and a generous smile. She saw some of the looks of her peers. Some mocking. Some patronizing. She laughed a little to herself. She enjoyed being underestimated, for now.
They were all here. She had waited until even the little princess arrived, savoring entering last, a treat which that little madam normally demanded.
“If we are all here,” she said magnanimously, taking her seat at the head of the table, “we can begin.
“We do not have a great deal of business to go over today. I can update you formally, though I know you are all privy to the reports of the latest composite imaging coming from New Mobilius. We are now officially able to make out the planet and its moon. Images still seem to be suffering from some degradation, apparently there is a gravitational anomaly that cannot be accounted for that is throwing off our imaging, but my AM assures me that the issue is temporary, and we should see marked improvement over the next weeks and months.”
“If I may,” asked Theer-im Far, and several members groaned inwardly to themselves, but soon the archivist went on, “you say that the anomaly cannot be accounted for, that is not entirely accurate. It can be accounted for, just not by explanations that fall within our understanding of the technological capabilities of New Mobilius’s aboriginal species.”
Here we go, thought several members of the group, including the chair, but some among them, including Quavoce and the ever-diligent Shtat, were curious where the archivist was going with this.
“The anomaly, for example, could not be an error at all, or a distortion caused by radiation from the planet’s sun. The gravitational distortion is potentially indicative, for example, of a second moon, or a large orbital.”
Some openly laughed, and while the derisive noise was filtered out by the Yallan AM hosting the simulation, the somewhat exaggerated laughter could be seen on more faces than Quavoce would have thought likely. He scowled at Sar Lamati, something she would have fiercely rebutted from anyone else, but she did seek his respect, and as such she relented, and even appeared momentarily contrite, for her.
But even Quavoce had to admit that this speculation from the ever-diligent Hemmbar representative was beyond the pale. And when the Hemmbar Council member had finished, Quavoce voiced the room’s incredulity, speaking politely but firmly. “Respectfully, Theer-im, I think we can assume there is no way the initial recon probes could have miscounted the number of moons around our destination. So what you suggest would require the humans to have managed to build or harvest an orbital body in the last twenty years, something that would have been far outside their ability on an ordinary technological timeline, let alone with the added obstacle of our advanced team working in their midst.”
Quavoce waited for a reply, but was not surprised when the archivist quietly nodded and sat back. The academic had not been proposing something he felt needed to be discussed, it seemed, so much as playing the role he felt was his. And it was an important role, no doubt about that, the role of devil’s advocate. Quavoce nodded at the Hemmbar, appreciating him once again. He respected the need for people like that. They kept you on your toes.
But that did not mean you needed to allow every possible theory to cloud your judgment, no matter how outlandish. So Quavoce now added, “That said, it is a fair observation, Theer-im, thank you for that. But such a supposition
would necessarily imply that the advanced team has not only failed, but been, well, co-opted in some way, and down such paranoid channels lies only paralyzing fear, something any military leader learns to avoid early.”
There were some nods, and even some rolled eyes as his pride in his martial training started to turn the color of conceit, but he went on regardless. “I caution that such opinions should continue to see the light of day, and we should remain as open-minded as possible, but I think we can safely categorize this one as unlikely, in the extreme.”
Quavoce looked magnanimously around the room, looking for support. To-Henton did not let his friend stand alone, and added, sternly, “Good points all, I am sure. The good news is that in the extremely unlikely event that such a thing is true, we have time to let the image resolve and react accordingly.”
All very fair of them, thought the group as a whole, feeling self-satisfied.
The chair took control of the meeting once more, and started to wade through this week’s series of internal conflicts, lawsuits, and information claims that had been alleged and filed between the various members of various races as their long journey wound its way through its last decade.
Big news, thought DefaLuta, as the Yallan waffled on. Her appetite for these meetings had waned, she had to admit, since they had completed their translation through the Alpha Centauri cluster. Of course, that had also been her last turn as Council chair, and at the very least these tedious, unimaginative surroundings would be different if she was in charge.
These last years of approach had proved the hardest, for her, and if it weren’t for her role on the Council she would no doubt have undergone voluntary mental hibernation like so many had as the journey dragged on.
But there were other things afoot, as well. Movement. DefaLuta had always known it would come, but now even the Arbite reports were starting to show patterning. Allegiances, long suspected, were starting to creep out into the open, and DefaLuta was as concerned about some of the ties that were starting to show themselves as she was about her own efforts at subterfuge coming to light.
The Kyryl were nobody’s subordinate, and so had stayed away from any overtures from the Lamat Empire, however circumspect and vague they might have been. But though the Kyryl had more cause than most to feel like they should not have to ally themselves with a megalomaniac like Sar Lamati, someone clearly utterly incapable of sharing power, DefaLuta was not immune to the allure of safety in greater numbers.
She had found friends in surprising places over the last few years. The most interesting lead had come when her back channels had fed her a simple line, one of warning. Warning of the ever more obvious union of Lamat and Eltoloman, but more importantly, the potential that the Mantilatchi might succumb after all, a turn of events that would unite a force too great to be opposed, even if all others stood together against them.
But the most interesting part, thought DefaLuta, glancing across the table at the innocuous-looking Shtat Palpatum, had been the source of the warning. One of Shtat’s underlings, though DefaLuta’s informants had been unable to uncover which.
It had led to a roundabout conversation between her and the Nomadi Alliance leadership. A conversation that had led to a more covert inquiry, and then an extremely covert proposition. DefaLuta stared at the Nomadi now. After a moment she caught his eye and he returned her gaze. He looked befuddled. He always did.
He was not a fool, this was just not his arena. He was out of his depth. He could not play this game because he did not understand the point of it, the definition of victory. But DefaLuta did. And she knew that this man was not the real leader of the Nomadi. The question, then, was who was?
She had her ideas, and her sources continued to feed her more and more information as a truer picture of the inner workings of the loosely formed but still strong traders’ alliance emerged. But, like the images forming of Earth, or New Mobilius, as they would soon anoint it, there were fractures in the picture, blurs, errors. It was all very curious. Things were not as they seemed in the Nomadi Alliance.
Maybe it was not as strong as everyone had always suspected, thought DefaLuta, drawing her eyes away from the perplexed-looking Nomadi Council member to peruse the room as a whole again. And what other surprises lay in wait as the final years ticked by?
They would find out, she supposed.
Interval H: Before
…3…
“But why?” said Gussy.
“Because there is no plan for it, yet,” replied the chairman of Third Yalla, or rather Mum, as Gussy knew her.
“But I am twelve now, I have rights,” said Gussy, with every pretense of seriousness.
The chairman stifled a laugh that threatened to send this all-too frequent topic of discussion into a more heated debate. She could, she knew, have her AM handle this, but when it came to parenting, she was the same as she was in business; she believed in traditional, face-to-face methods.
Not that she had ever actually seen her daughter, Gussy, or even touched her. The girl had been born after a malfunction in one of the million cryo-units housed in the transport ships had suffocated its occupant. The unit had been repaired, but the man inside had been beyond saving. Too long had passed before the error was discovered, indeed it was only the slow fermentation of his dead body that had alerted the system to the fault.
It had to all be hushed up, but when you had this many units, and this much time, even the most robust systems must eventually fail, and eventually those failures will trickle down through the multiple redundant fail-safes that backed up all such structures and you would have a critical breakdown. It was a simple probability of scale, even the most improbable of events morph toward certainties with enough repetition.
The upside, for the chairman, had been that a spot in the previously full fleet had opened up, and as it had been a Yallan who had died, it was the Yallan chairman that had been allowed to fill the spot.
She had filled it with a stored progeny design from her first union, transposed into her personal AM’s databanks before they left. Young Gussy had been slated to be among the first generations born on New Mobilius. Now she would be one of only forty-three born in transit there.
And now Gussy wanted, like all blossoming youths, to be allowed into adulthood. Only she was not an adult. She was both much older and much younger than the twelve years she had perceived. As she clamored for the right to access the full net of the fleet, and wander the public sims to interact with the other members of the Yallan and other contingents, her body was still, the chairman knew, unnaturally stunted.
There was nothing wrong with it, it was only that while the mind was allowed to grow and mature and move within the cryo-unit’s supplemented and enriched systems, the body was, by design, put on hold. Gussy, then, was a maturing young woman in the distorted body of an infant.
That alone would not prevent her from entering the virtual world that was home to the fleet’s million-odd inhabitants. But her candor, innocence, and youthful curiosity would. For Gussy’s birth was, by necessity, a secret. No one on the Council wished the failures in any system to be made public, especially the cryo-units, no matter how rare said failures were.
And so the chairman of Third Yalla, Mum, looked at her daughter and said, once again, “We have, my little lightning bolt, been over this before, and you know your mother is nothing if not constant on such things.”
Gussy groaned. She wanted to meet new people. Not the amalgams that the AMs created, however engaging, and certainly not the various senior toadies of the Third Yallan Wholly Owned Subsidiary Corporation, who, being privy to her existence, were allowed to extend their profound sycophantism and general licking of her mother’s nether regions to her own young self.
She had enjoyed it, the attention, once upon a time. But it had soured in her as she came to see them for the lackluster fools they were. She wanted to meet real people. She wanted to meet the other members of this great colony force, and most of all, she wanted t
o meet a member of the pilot elite.
But that, she knew as she glared at her immovable mother, was not going to happen, not in this lifetime. She sighed and turned away, stepping out of the space into one of her many simulated play areas. A network of tree-houses nestled above a broad fen, joined by rickety rope bridges she could nimbly hop across, and thrilling ropes to allow her to swing between her many little oases in the dense jungle scene.
The life here was like the moist air, noisy and thick around her, and she reveled in it. This is what she imagined being in one of the networking hubs must be like. So many strange sounds and sensations. She closed her eyes and listened to the animals and birds fleeting around her in their brief but magnificent existences, and she dreamed of adventures to come.
She could not know that the dose of reality to break the monotony was around the corner.
…2…
Gurdy opened his eyes to the light. It was powerful and all around him, like he was sat inside a star. But there was pattern in the light, and he tried to urge his brain to adjust. He must take it in, must find the clues.
There.
No … wait …
Suddenly, blackness again.
Shit, he thought. He had missed it. He breathed deep, or rather he sent a signal through his brain’s life-support systems to prepare themselves, a mental sigh, then the tendrils of his perceptive cortices, enhanced and trained as they were into the pattern of the Skalm’s systems, settled and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
He would not know when it would come. Or even if it would come. That was the nature of glance practice. Microsecond flashes in which he must be ready to respond.
The simulations were the hardest and purest level of flight practice, and as such they were not designed to be beaten. They were designed to teach the pilot elite two things: that they must learn to clear their minds of all distractions, and that, no matter how good they were, the glance was faster and harder than they were, and they must always strive to be better.