Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  Rada's heart sank in the exact opposite way that her body had floated away from Nereid in the dream.

  Toman stopped and gave the camera a funny look. "I finally got Kansas to speak to me. Her big idea is to accept that the Lurkers will take Earth no matter what we do, wait for them to settle down on it, and then bombard them.

  "I don't like that idea. It means that Earth is ruined and ten billion people are dead, along with everyone else the Lurkers will have killed in the meantime. And that's if it works. But you know Kansas, there's no talking her out of what she's going to do. Your only way to get anywhere with her is to do something.

  "So we're coming to join you. Even though there's no hope. Even though we'll be outnumbered and outgunned. Even though there's a part of me that knows we're missing something, some last idea or ingredient, and that if we'd only had a little more time, we could have figured out what that something was. Because if we wait any longer, the Lurkers will have already destroyed everything we're fighting for.

  "We'll arrive in the Belt in three days. Our heading and estimated velocity on arrival are attached. Get yourself up to speed and let's go kill some aliens."

  The screen went blank. Rada found herself on her feet. Toman's fleet had been battered in the previous fights, and halved by the split with Kansas, but he still commanded the Hive, the remnants of FinnTech and Valiant, the Dark Solutions contingent, and numerous other corporate warships. Together with the remaining ships from Earth and the Belt, they'd field more than half the numbers of the Lurker fleet.

  Which didn't sound like the best of odds. But miracles had been made with less.

  She sent a comm request to Admiral Vance, noticing as she did so that he had been trying to reach her while she was sleeping. The secretary put her through.

  "Admiral Vance," Rada said. "I've just heard from Toman. They're coming to join us!"

  The admiral's mouth twitched. It was a long way from the triumph Rada had expected. "I am glad to hear that Admiral Benez has finally come to the understanding that he won't accomplish anything hiding beneath the surface of a moon. Under better circumstances, I would be happy to fly next to him."

  "What circumstances are preventing you from doing that?"

  "War has come to Earth."

  "War? At the risk of being flip, what were you calling it before now?"

  "I'm not referring to the invasion. I'm referring to war between the nations of Earth. There has already been a nuclear exchange in the east. Multiple states have already declared war."

  Rada's heart thumped dumbly. "They're fighting each other? Why would they go to war at a time like this?"

  "We're still gathering information, but we believe Sveylan is striking back at the Unified Defense League for its betrayal of Earth. Whatever the cause, if the conflict expands any further, it will destroy the planet's remaining ability to fight back."

  "You mean to fly to Earth right now. Without waiting for backup from Toman."

  "No nation would have dared to wield nuclear weapons against another if my fleet had remained in orbit. It is my duty to save the nations of Earth from themselves."

  "You've hardly got fifty ships. What if the Lurkers beat you there?"

  "Then they will surely attack Earth as well. Our objective then will be to disrupt them and draw them away from the planet until such a time as your reinforcements arrive."

  She shook her head. "I have a bad feeling about this, Admiral. You should negotiate with the nations at war from here. Toman's ships are already at speed, you'd only have to wait three days."

  "And a planet-killing nuclear exchange can be touched off in minutes. We depart forty minutes from now. Bring aid when you can, and we will do our part to ensure there's something left to be aided."

  The Earth fleet was still being seen to by Belter supply barges. But precisely forty minutes later, the last of the supply ships broke away, returning to the nearby asteroid habitat of Defiance. As soon as the Belter ships were clear, the battered Earth fleet—hardly a tenth of what it had been before the debacle with the Lurker vanguard, the ambush Rada had kicked off in Earth orbit, and the Battle for the Belt less than a day before—ignited their engines, accelerating slowly as they warmed up, then letting loose with everything they had.

  Rada had the feeling she would never see them again.

  ~

  Toman's fleet would pass by the Belt at nearly its peak speed. In peaceful times, Rada would simply accelerate along their current course until they caught up to her, but given that there was an alien fleet in the System and no one had any idea where it currently was, that felt like an idea of Webberian idiocy.

  Instead, she set out on a loop across a broad section of the Belt, meaning to build up speed before straightening out as Toman neared. As she cleared her course with the Belters, Winters requested permission to match it and come aboard.

  She cleared him, mildly annoyed that she wasn't being left alone to stew. He stepped onto the bridge of the Silence and seated himself with such familiarity she knew he'd flown the ship before himself.

  "The information about the war unfolding on Earth came from my people," he said. "They also have information regarding your friends, Mr. MacAdams and Mr. Webber. I'll take this right before the bones. They were investigating the conflict when a nuclear device was dropped on the city they had been assigned to. It's not known whether they survived."

  "What do you mean, it's not known? If they got nuked, is there any reason to believe they could have survived?"

  "Yes," Winters said simply. "Because they've survived worse in the past."

  "Tell me you're searching for them."

  "Of course we are. They may have an extremely valuable informant in their custody. Additionally, they have accomplished a great deal for Dark Solutions in the past few weeks. Our assets on Earth will do everything they can to recover your friends."

  Rada nodded. "Honestly, you probably don't need to look for them at all. If they're alive, they'll find you."

  Winters smiled, which he didn't do often and which made him look like less of a prototype. "I expect that you're right."

  "Is that what you came aboard to tell me? That my friends might be dead but they might also not?"

  "I came to tell you something I'm not supposed to tell you at all. But it's like I said: your friends have been doing vital work for DS. You have, too. I think you deserve to finally know what we are."

  "I've got the gist. You were set up to find answers to questions other people are too frightened to even ask. Like how to make sure humanity can find a way to survive even in the face of overwhelming alien invasion."

  "This is true. But how about when?"

  "What?"

  "When was Dark Solutions established?"

  Rada hunched her shoulders. "Hell if I know. But you're well-established. Fifty years?"

  "A little longer."

  "Eighty years. Outer Colonization Period. That would explain where you got all your money."

  "Oh, a little longer than that."

  "Winters, this game is getting old. Either you can tell me, or I can look it up on my device."

  "Your device won't give you an accurate date. No one outside of our organization knows the truth. Dark Solutions was officially founded 967 years ago."

  She stared at him. "Shut up. 967 years ago, Walt Lawson was still terrorizing the seas."

  "Yes, exactly."

  "Don't tell me he founded DS!"

  "The idea was actually the philosopher Mauser's. At that point, he had been advising Queen Raina on the defense and development of her kingdom for over thirty years. They were highly successful—crops, walls, cattle, a system of laws, a militia to keep out the barbarians—but when he looked out at it all, something gnawed at him.

  "Raina's subjects were building a new civilization. They were fully dedicated to this task. But Mauser saw that, in their devotion, something vital was being lost. In the early years, the horror of the Panhandler and the Swimmers had been fresh
. By that point, however, it was being taken for granted. Some of its most major lessons already seemed to be fading from the public consciousness. Mauser found this extremely troubling.

  "It was his desire to reunite those he had known during the war. The ones who had experienced the fighting firsthand. So he called for a reunion, hoping they could reignite the creative spark of the Plague Years, and prevent that era from slipping away. He didn't know if anyone would come. Weirdness was obviously not going to attend. No one had heard from Tristan in years. But Walt and Carrie came, along with two of their sons. Mia returned from her wandering. Though he was then in his nineties, Raina's knife-fighting instructor arrived. The Adirondack Republic sent a delegation. And so on.

  "After three days of festivities, Mauser laid out his idea: that they should found an institution that would work from that day forward to see that an alien conquest could never take Earth again."

  Rada squinted. "What were a bunch of chicken-farming primitives going to do to stop another invasion? Make the aliens die of cholera?"

  "Work to ensure that one day their descendants could resist the attack."

  Rada glanced at the screen, which was currently aimed at Earth. "No offense, but I think they should have worked a little harder."

  "There's only so much you can do to prepare for an attack by superior forces. All you can do is maximize the resources and technology at hand. Mauser's vision was to build an institution that would work with what was available at that moment and instantly incorporate new technology into its strategy as that technology appeared.

  "The first layer of his theory was the creation of the idea itself, along with recruiting those who would help shepherd it across the years. That was what the reunion was for, along with the recruitment protocols they formalized. The second layer was to develop resources and build an infrastructure. In the early days, this meant the investment of wealth, the maintenance of lines of communication—messengers, at that point, along with trade routes and sailing ships—as well as the restoration of manual book-making techniques.

  "The third layer was the preservation of knowledge and the expansion of theory. Some members of the institution gathered and practiced survival techniques. Others discussed methods of resistance at various levels of technology as well as more unconventional methods of ensuring the long-term survival of the species, such as seeding other planets with our genetic material.

  "The fourth layer was to take these resources and ideas and put them into assets that could directly stand against an alien attack. This phase took the longest to realize, because it depended on technology which was, in those early days, still centuries away. Here I refer to weapons, defenses, research, electronic communications, and so forth. Including in some cases the preservation of more analog technology that could be used in the breakdown of our modern networks."

  Rada tapped her finger on the small table they were seated at. "And you guys have been doing this for nearly a thousand years? What exactly were you doing that whole time? Getting together to hold Swimmer War reenactments?"

  "As I said, in the earliest days, our focus was on gathering survival and warfare techniques that we'd honed during the Plague Years and after. We still have this information to this day and will start to disseminate it soon to begin guerrilla war against the Lurkers. Or, on the off chance we actually win this thing, to begin rebuilding.

  "As the Second Space Age neared, we invested heavily in rocket propulsion, and then in colonization. We purchased assets like ships and habitats. On Earth, we built jets and submarines and a backup comms network. Later, we built the bafflers you and your friends used to take out Thor Finn."

  "That wasn't you. That was another company altogether."

  "Only because it's better that most of our work doesn't point back to us in any way. But who do you think invested in them in the first place?" He lifted his eyebrows, then went on. "With another few years, we would have had mirror shielding despite there being no human-built lasers powerful enough for there to be any need for it. We also invested in people like Toman."

  "Toman? How was he involved in this?"

  "Completely without his knowledge. We simply saw that he was a highly intelligent young man whose interest in space was rivaled only by his obsession with aliens. I would say our investment paid off heavily."

  Winters ran his thumb across the stubble on his jaw. "Our work during this time also involved cultivating resources within the bigger governments. In case of emergency, this would allow us to perform actions like, oh, say, giving you command of the UDL's fleet just as they were about to surrender it to the Lurkers. While at the same time giving your friends on the ground the means to assassinate the politician responsible for that surrender."

  "Isn't the whole infiltration thing a little inefficient and weird? Surely major governments would also see the benefits of building defenses against a second alien invasion. Why not just work directly with them?"

  Winters laughed, light dancing in his eyes. "That was precisely what Mauser wanted to avoid. His generation had been the last to witness the state of technologically-enhanced governments at work. Both elected officials and unelected institutions were overrun with power-seekers who ignored the will of the people—and far worse, by ideologues who actively betrayed the desires of the people and filled the government with fellow true believers who cared nothing for what their citizens wanted them to do. For an example of this in the modern day, look no further than how the leaders of the UDL member-states ignored their people's will to fight and sold them out to the Lurkers instead.

  "Mauser knew that attaching Dark Solutions to any government would ensure that, in no more than three generations, our institution would be subverted by politically-driven agendas and effectively destroyed. He knew this would be its fate even if it had zero initial ties to political organs. In his eyes, the only way to protect it from this subversion was to build it to be like a religion. To establish unbreakable core principles—and to punish those who did break the principles as the heretics they were."

  Before Rada could ask what those principles were, Winters got to his feet and moved to stand in front of the big screen. It was displaying the view as seen from the nose of the Silence as the ship gathered speed across the Belt: a pretty but otherwise unremarkable field of stars.

  He reached toward it, finger tracing from star to star. "And why shouldn't we treat it like a religion? There can be no higher calling than preserving our species in the face of a hostile universe filled with intelligent enemies. It's no coincidence that this objective is best done by spreading between the stars. To do so is a pilgrimage. The stars gave birth to us. The stars showed us how to understand the passage of deep time. The stars guided the way for us to navigate across the land and the sea. People have always worshipped the sun. But every star we reach will give us a new sun to wonder at."

  He inhaled through his nose as if startled. "This is all part of a scheme that our ancestors started preparing us for nearly a millennium ago. If we stop this invasion, and save our homes we've made around our birth star, I believe it will be because of the connection we have kept alive between ourselves and those who came before us."

  He turned to face her. "You have made yourself a key part of this process, Rada. You have accomplished more for this cause than nearly anyone else in our history. You deserve to be a formal part of Dark Solutions."

  Rada tilted her head. "If I'm already doing so much, what more will formally joining you accomplish?"

  "For one thing, it will stop my superiors from executing me for what I've just told you. More, it is for your own sake. The opportunity to be a part of the tradition of the human spirit of survival."

  "Whatever this tradition is, I barely know anything about it. I didn't know it was a tradition until fifteen minutes ago."

  "No one joins an institution knowing everything about it. You learn more of it as you go along. Understanding the tradition by participating in it is at the core of any traditio
n."

  "What exactly would I have to do?"

  Winters smiled. "For now, nothing more than you're already doing."

  "You mean nothing more than everything humanly possible to prevent our extinction? What about afterwards?"

  "I know that my superiors will welcome whatever advice, leadership, and action you are willing to offer."

  She was about to shrug him off with a thanks but no thanks. She still knew almost nothing about Dark Solutions. On top of that, she didn't know what was to be gained from it when she'd been doing just fine on loan from the Hive.

  Yet how much more could the Hive—and herself—have gotten done if they'd been working with Dark Solutions since the beginning?

  "Have you guys really been working toward this since the days of the founders?"

  "We still have the original documents signed by Mauser, Raina, Walt, and their friends. We call their agreement the Forever Plan. We're still pursuing their vision to this day." He gave her a serious look. "Though there was a while in the middle there when some of us started to think the whole thing was a little silly."

  "I'm in," she said, and felt a strange thrill, as though she'd stepped through a portal into a world she'd never known was there. "Let's hope we've got another 967 years ahead of us."

  ~

  Twelve hours after Vance's fleet had begun its journey back to Earth, Rada's device chimed. The message wasn't from Vance. Or Toman. In fact, there was no header on it at all. She brought it up on the screen, expecting to be met with an image of a dozen Dark Solutions elders in black robes ready to initiate her into their secret society.

  Instead, the gray, bug-eyed face of a Swimmer looked out at her.

  "You call for help," the Dovon said. "But there is no help to give. You won versus us with odds that were much better for us and much worse for you than the odds that now stare you down. You must face this on your own and you must win on your own. Seek answers in those that you thought were dead, and you may still save yourself."