by Webb, Nick
Shelby Proctor’s hand-me-down? “Are you saying you’re giving me the Independence? A bit overkill, don’t you think?”
“No. Not the Independence. Way too big for what you need. You need something small, fast, undetectable, but can still pack a punch should the situation call for it. I’m giving you the Defiance, Tim. You, Commander Rice, and a small select crew of less than ten will be enough to staff it.”
“Oh.” Granger was surprised. He wouldn’t have called the Defiance a hand-me-down. It was IDF’s state-of-the-art stealth ship. T-jump drive. Rail guns. PDCs. The works. No infinitely-cored computer like the Independence had, which saved them at the final climactic battle against the Swarm, but it definitely wasn’t a hand-me-down. “Well. Thank you, Christian.”
“I’ve got your crew on it already. I’m sorry—when I say select crew, I mean that they’re all fresh-faced recruits. It’s all we can manage at the moment, given the circumstances.”
Bastard. “I understand. And I’ve won wars before with fresh-faced recruits. As long as they know how to run the galley’s coffee maker we’ll be good.”
Oppenheimer gave one of his grim nods. “Thank you, Tim. If you could get underway by tomorrow, that’d be great. You’ll find all the relevant mission details on the Defiance when you get there. Oppenheimer out.”
The fleet admiral’s face disappeared, replaced by the logo of IDF on his handset. He let it fall back on his abdomen.
He didn’t know what possessed him to do it, but he picked the data pad back up and flipped to his messages.
There it was. The one from his lawyer. This time he actually read the subject line.
OFFER FOR SETTLEMENT
Settlement? “I thought she refused to settle,” he said to himself. He opened the message and skimmed the first paragraph. Right. Just as he thought. She’d refused all monetary offers of settlement. He read further to see what she wanted. “Goddammit,” he murmured.
A moment later, as if he’d been listening in, Rice poked his head through the door. “Doing alright, sir? Need anything?”
“No, thank you, Tim.” He waved the data pad off and let it drop to his chest.
A look of shock spread over the young man’s face. “You— you remembered my name.”
“How could I forget it, son? It’s a good one.”
“You never remember my name.” He entered the room fully. “Maybe that therapy is working already. Tell me, sir, do you remember my rank? My specialty? Anything else about me?”
Granger closed his eyes again. The headache was dissipating, but the lights still hurt. “You’re an admiral, you specialize in asshattery, and you’re very good at getting me coffee. How’d I do?”
“Irish? Or just black?”
He squinted his eyes open again. “I’m a thirteen-billion-year-old man with a splitting headache and a boss who wants me to do a book report on the Swarm. What the hell do you think?”
“Irish coffee coming right up, sir. Extra Irish, just like you like.”
Granger smiled and closed his eyes again. He liked this kid. He hoped his fresh-out-of-diapers crew was just as easy to work with.
CHAPTER NINE
Sol Sector
Earth
New York City
United Earth Executive Offices Tower
President John Carlos Sepulveda ripped the top piece of paper from the pad on his desk, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash.
He’d just sat down. He’d been on his goddamn feet for over eighteen hours, trying to save humanity and go down in history as the greatest president in United Earth history. He’d had meeting after mind-bendingly boring staff, National Security Council, and cabinet meetings; two executive order signing ceremonies—one public, one top secret— that would hopefully take his shackles off and let him fight, goddammit; five private meetings with senators; lunch with the veep; dinner with CIDR’s President Wen; tea with the Pope; brainstorming strategy with the top IDF commanders; and a three-hour marathon session with his press shop and speech writers. He was a tad tired and irritable. And all that was on top of the sudden month-old presidential campaign. He was starting to regret daring Congress to call a new election.
And now this. He stood up, fished the crumpled paper out of the trash, read it again, re-crumpled it, and threw it again toward the bin.
This time he missed and it bounced off, landing near the chair sitting across from the Resolute desk.
“And now you can’t even shoot. Wonderful. Greatest president indeed.”
A voice from the doorway startled him. “That’s what Mrs. Dolworth’s third-grade classroom says anyway.”
First Lady Sepulveda stepped into the UE presidential office and gestured up to the crayon-drawn pictures all fixed to a poster hanging temporarily nearby on the wall. Each week it was replaced with another poster from another classroom in another school. But this week Mrs. Dolworth’s class from Sunrise Elementary was showering him with over-the-top hyperbolic praises. Best president ever! Our hero! President butt-kicker! Don’t mess with the big S!
She walked right up to the poster and pointed. “That one’s my favorite. They don’t stand a chance against our President Sepulveda.”
The president let out a puff of air in exasperation. “They? Those kids don’t even know who they are. And what’s worse? Neither the hell do we.”
“Darling—”
“And you want to know my favorite?” He stood up and joined his wife in front of the giant poster. “This one.” He tapped on an especially pink drawing down near the bottom, half covered by another—no doubt put there by the teacher in that fashion to distract from it.
She bent down to read. “President S.: he’s pretty good! Even though he’s only there cuz his boss died.” She held a hand to her mouth to stifle the snicker. When she noticed his face she rested a hand on his shoulder. “Oh honey. She’s just a kid.”
“But you know what Claire? It’s true. Everyone knows it. No one says it to my face—at least no one here,” he swept an arm around the office as if to indicate his entire administration. “But it’s understood by everyone. I’m only here because the old bastard Quimby died. And I’ll never escape that. We spent years, Claire, years laying the groundwork for our run. Setting the stage to win the presidency in a landslide, making the right friends and crossing the right people and kissing just the right asses. We were going to have such a legacy, Claire. And instead? This. Third-grader Suzie Tompkins saying, President S: he’s pretty good!”
“Darling I—”
“Get Arjun in here. We’ve got a problem.”
She paused, seemingly forgetting what she was trying to say. “What is it?”
“You’ll see.” He motioned with his head toward the door. “Get him in here.”
The first lady left through the door leading to the hallway that housed various staff-member offices, including his chief of staff, Arjun Sukarno, and moments later returned with a diminutive weaselly looking middle-aged man with a mustache, comb-over, and gold-rimmed glasses. His chief of staff looked like a middle-manager at an Indonesian groundcar insurance company. But that was part of his superpower—everyone looked past him, or dismissed him, or underestimated him, never realizing they were ignoring the guy that was pulling half the strings in New York and Britannia, God rest the planet’s soul.
“Mr. President?”
“Sit down, Jun.” Before the man could even take a step toward the chair at the desk, Sepulveda asked, “How many people have access to this office?”
Sukarno considered a moment, before answering, “maybe thirty or so? Counting Secret Service and cleaning staff? Maybe another twenty, give or take. Why?”
“Effective immediately, no one in or out unless it’s you, her,” indicating his wife, “Su, Maxwell, and Chakrabarti. That’s it. We’ll expand the list later as we run through some additional background checks and ask some pointed questions, but for now we’ve got to tighten security.”
“Okay,” said Su
karno. “Easy enough. Secret Service? If you can’t trust them, who else can you trust?”
Sepulveda considered for a moment. “Just Danforth,” he said. He was pretty confident he could trust the SAIC, the lead Secret Service officer in charge of the presidential offices. “If other officers are here, he needs to be here too. Otherwise, they can all guard me just as well by standing outside.”
“Okay,” repeated Sukarno. “And now the obvious question: why—”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that. But first, a question for you, Arjun.” He finally sat down, motioning to his wife to grab a chair from near the wall and join them at the desk. “How many people survived Britannia?”
Sukarno’s eyebrows brows raised up a hair. “Survived Britannia? Sir, scientists say the surface temperature reached over fifty thousand degrees as it broke apart.”
“So, zero then?”
“Zero, sir.”
“Ships in orbit?”
“Sir?”
“How many ships in orbit survived?”
“Civilian? Just a handful—the ones that had q-jump coordinates already entered in, or were far enough away to get them calculated.”
“And we know exactly which ships, do we not?”
“We know every person, dog, rat, and flea that made it off that planet, sir.”
Sepulveda stroked his chin, lost in thought. It was a mystery, to be sure. In fact, could they be sure? A planet with billions of people, with perhaps thousands of ships in orbit—his administration and the military knew exactly which ones made it off in time? During all that chaos?
“I suppose you’re worried someone made it off alive, holds you personally responsible for what happened, and is now out to get you?”
Sepulveda could hear in the man’s tone that he was joking.
But Sepulveda was not joking.
“Arjun, tell me about the last days of the final Avery administration. It was chaos, wasn’t it?”
Sukarno looked genuinely surprised by the change of subject, but went along with it. “I was just a junior-level staffer at State, so I don’t know all the nitty-gritty. But yeah, she just up and resigned with a month on the clock and basically disappeared for a year. Every department was in the dark about it, only finding out from the news. Shit show for a few weeks. Then she put out that press release saying not to worry, everything was fine, she just finally needed a good long vacation. Showed a video of her drinking a margarita on a beach on Britannia. And then a few weeks later the new administration was in, and that was that.”
Sepulveda shook his head. “No, no, no. See? There’s a huge problem there. The woman was legendary for her micro-management of the entire executive branch. She had secret program after secret program, code words upon ciphers upon quantum-crypto-programs, she had cloak and dagger, always dueling with Malakov, the Russian Confederation president—I mean, the woman lived and breathed the imperial presidency. It was her life. She was a legend. And then she just gives it up? To lay on a goddamned beach?”
“It was rather unexpected, yes sir. Although, to your point, she did maintain a lot of her influence and pulled an ungodly number of strings into late life, even as recently as the week before the Britannia disaster—if my sources are right.”
Sepulveda tapped his fingers on the desk in nervous expectation, as if expecting someone to burst through the door at any moment and start shooting. “She survived not one, not two, but three separate assassination attempts.”
“Sir, is that what this is about? I assure you—”
“No, Arjun, that is in fact not what this is about. If they kill me, they kill me. What this is about,” he stood up and walked to the poster, and pointed at the word they, “is that everyone, everyone, is scared to death that they are coming. The Findiri, some mysterious and all-powerful enemy, are practically at our doorstep. An enemy we’ve neither seen directly nor communicated with, nor had even the slightest contact with, save for just a few dozen minutes at the first battle of Penumbra when they briefly joined and fought the Swarm back into that black hole and then left just as suddenly. Or maybe they were destroyed by the Swarm—no one knows. And as far as we could tell, it was just two ships. Hell, we’re not even sure they were Findiri—they didn’t exactly announce themselves.”
“The military is one hundred percent convinced they’re on their way—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know what Oppenheimer says. What Granger says. I’ve seen the reports. I know about that kid they found in the wreckage of Zion’s Haven. And it’s got the entire planet in an uproar. And that’s all on top of the Britannia disaster. Billions of people dead, tens of millions left without a home, and countless people grieving lost loved ones. So on the heels of one disaster, another one is maybe coming that everyone is losing their shit over—”
“Understandably,” interjected Sukarno. “The Swarm nearly destroyed us. Three times now in the last hundred years. It’s understandable that people are a little . . . on edge.”
“Add to that two new alien races—two!—that decide now is the best time to show up. We’ve got the Dolmasi—just practically had a war with them, and our diplomats say they’re not quite convinced we’re at peace yet—we’ve got the Skiohra who claim to have found their homeworld and are barricading themselves in the system telling everyone to fuck off, under pain of death. We’ve got the all-powerful Valarisi, newly liquified after Oppenheimer evicted them from the bodies of IDF personnel, all swishing around in some giant pool at a top-secret IDF research lab. And to top it off we’ve got a dead starship captain that half of humanity practically worships, returning from the grave with portents of doom. Except he’s senile and can’t remember the details of said portents, never mind what he had for lunch today.”
Sukarno nodded slowly. “All of which are known problems with straightforward if not difficult solutions, sir.”
First Lady Sepulveda leaned in. “Darling, where are you going with this?”
“I’m just saying, I’m dealing with more shit than any United Earth president has ever had to deal with, and I’m doing it all while half of the nation thinks I’m illegitimate.” He glowered at them. He took a deep breath, his temper partially sated. “But even that’s not the point. The point is this. That’s a lot of shit to be dealing with, yes. And now we add this.” He looked down at the floor.
They both looked at him, expectantly. “What?”
He motioned to the floor, toward the crumpled-up piece of paper near Sukarno’s chair. The chief of staff pushed his glasses further up his nose, leaned over, picked it up, un-crumpled it, and silently read.
“Read it out loud,” said Sepulveda. “I found it on my desk when I walked in five minutes ago.”
Sukarno’s eyebrows practically popped off the man’s forehead as he read aloud. “President Avery is alive,” he looked up at the president, continuing, “and she wants what’s hers.”
CHAPTER TEN
Sol Sector
ISS Defiance
Bridge
Granger’s new crew was not easy to work with.
Oppenheimer wasn’t kidding when he said they were all fresh recruits. At least they’d all been to a few years at the various IDF academies around United Earth. But since the sudden disastrous war two months ago, every cadet above second year was automatically graduated, granted the rank of ensign, and sent off to their posts. The attrition rate in the short war had been so high that it was the only thing they could do to keep the fleet staffed.
“Ensign Nagin, for the fifth time today, I’m asking you to not do that. If I have to ask again, you’re on floor-scrubbing duty down in the galley,” said Granger, eyeing the young man at navigation with distaste.
“Sir? Am . . . am I doing something wrong?” he said. Or squeaked. His voice was higher than many women he’d dated, decades ago.
“You’re bouncing your boot heels on the deck. It’s distracting. Do you know what happens when any of your bridge crew mates gets distracted during a battle?”
/> “They get . . . replaced, sir?”
“They get dead, Ensign. Along with the rest of us. No distractions.”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I’ll try harder.”
“And how many t-jumps until the Kiev Sector?”
The kid glanced all over his console. Left, right, up, down. Searching, eyes darting, trying to find the right number. Good Lord, it was a wonder they hadn’t all jumped into the middle of a star by now.
Lieutenant Commander Rice saved him. He walked by the nav station, heading toward tactical, and paused to point to the correct indicator on Nagin’s console. “Uh, six more, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Nagin. And Mr. Rice.”
On his way to tactical, Rice paused by Granger’s chair and bent low. “Sir? Request permission to run some training drills when you’re off duty tonight. I think these kids could use it—like, to actually learn how to use their consoles. Might come in handy in a war or something.”
“Granted. Don’t they teach this crap at the academy anymore? Is it all on-the-job training?”
“Well, generally they break out into specializations in their third year and learn specific technologies on a starship’s bridge, but these kids never had the chance. The admiral wasn’t kidding when he said they’re all fresh-faced recruits.”
Kids. The kid was calling the other bridge crew members kids. “How old are you, Commander?”
“Thirty-one, sir.”
A kid. Well, technically compared to him, a ninety-year-old was still a sperm caught in the act of burrowing into an egg. “Oh,” he said politely. “Carry on.” He pointed his chin back at the tactical station, and Rice retreated, checking in with the ensign on duty there, cleaning up whatever havoc she was causing with the ship’s stealth computer and weapons systems. At least she was a fourth-year cadet, and had some experience around a bridge.
Trusting Rice to maintain some modicum of professionalism among his bridge crew, he leaned back, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. The reason Oppenheimer had chosen him to go out, really, wasn’t because he wanted a detailed scientific analysis of the downfall of an alien civilization. It was because he thought maybe Granger would remember something. He’d never been to any of these sectors around the Penumbra system before. At least not in his regular human lifetime before the war.
