“Oh!” he said, with visible shock, “I am sorry, I did not understand. I… I will get back to work, and help you finish this!”
And with that he breathed deeply, mastered himself, and sadly turned back to his computer.
Viris sighed, and turned to hers.
An hour or so later, with Sader back, the three of them were working furiously. Viris stopped, sat back in her chair, and burst out a weary laugh.
“That’s it! I’ve got it, the missing piece. You two, hold on while I run this…”
They burst out laughing. Hugged each other and cheered. They had it! The Elder code was theirs.
The guard posted outside their door came running in, gun and ammo belts across his back. His expression said he was worried whether things were all right. Deba spoke quickly to him in their language, and the man went running off.
Viris called Tayyis.
“Tayyis, get down here, wake up the others… slag, even Karden, he’ll want to see! What? Yes, we’ve got it cracked!”
The excitement swept through Liberty Palace. Viris found herself hoping the Baccharans could be trusted, because among the ones nearby, this wasn’t staying a secret. Abida arrived with Tayyis and the rest of the team. Several other members of the revolutionary council followed shortly after. Everyone was talking at once. The last to arrive was Karden. He surveyed the scene. Somehow, he managed to get everyone quiet.
“Now, we need to decrypt their communications, and to start reviewing that Galactic Map program. I suggest we get the latter to Neem and Jat as quickly as possible.”
He continued, “We can’t yet duplicate the Elders holographic technology, but do have a large computer display in hopes of rendering it in simulated three dimensions. Therefore, those who speak Elder will need to break up into two teams, one here and one at the lab. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Viris eyed him with the special malevolence of exhaustion.
“After you get some sleep,” finished Karden.
///
Harker sat in a cheap hotel room he’d registered under a false identity. He could thank Viris Nane’s friends for the tools to pull that off. He’d gotten his family out of the country. Things had turned uglier than he’d ever imagined.
He took a call.
“Yep, things are at a near standstill here too. It’s working for now. We’ve got them in a slagging bind all right. They can’t just arrest us all, since getting us to go back to work is what they need. Not to mention that even with all the new laws they didn’t quite manage to make it illegal to fail to show up for work.”
“How are things in the north? I wasn’t able to get hold of Adis Nesin. What? All right, that’s good! I bet Vhel’s ugly head is exploding right now! The media have been running scared of him for a while now, but even they are starting to take notice, and there is nowhere for the blame to go but up.”
“I’ve thought of that too. I’m not sure even Vhel is crazy enough to just start pointing guns at people’s heads and ordering them to go back to work. Well maybe he is, but I hope not. If he does, he’ll be setting himself up on top of a powder keg, and all it’s going to need is a match.”
“The Elders? We’ll see. I have this feeling Vhel might have gone above and beyond the call of duty. But, if they get involved, and take his side, then fate help us all.”
A moment later, another call came in. In the midst of this crisis, his phone was never silent for more than a couple of minutes. The ID was unknown, but he decided to take it. Instead of answering immediately, he paused and waited.
“Pavol Harker?” said a voice he recognized.
“Dren Wimier? Yep it’s me! Boy am I surprised to hear from YOU!”
“As well you should be. Contrary to rumors I’m not dead or locked in a cell somewhere. I made sure to resign AFTER I was safely away.”
“Well that is good news. I know you aren’t calling me just to say hi. So what now?”
“This strike of yours Harker, it’s brilliant! I’ve never seen anything like it. It looks at first glance like a random cross-section of people but they aren’t. They’re key people, whether highly placed or not, and in all different professions and industries. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but there is one thing missing.”
“What’s that?”
“A name. Did you ever consider WHO it is you’ve pulled from the system?”
“Well, not as a group by name.”
“Harker, all my career I’ve believed in the positive power of government. I took the private sector for granted, but I never saw it as the enemy. Now I see that Vhel, Tarec, and some others do. I’m not sure about the Elders, but my talks with their diplomats make me think they just kind of assume it will be there, like I did, but in their case they see it as the job of lower orders… like us.”
“The people who have joined your strike are the producers, Harker, people who actually care about what they do, put their minds into it, create, and make things happen.”
“That much is true. I worked with the ones who were willing to talk to me.”
“So name it. Call it the strike of the producers. It will give it power and a rallying cry. It’ll make it a movement, and I think you’re going to need that sense of identity to keep it going when the crackdown comes. It will help them get through it till we can turn things around.”
“I like it. Can’t help but notice you said we, so you’ve got more to say. I’d guess it’s big.”
“I’ve got two more things. The first is, I heard from your friend Haral Karden, the one hiding in Bacchara. What I’m going to say next needs to stay between you and me. He might have already told you, but when I talked to him he’d been unable to get through to you… you’re a busy man for someone on the run.”
“No, I haven’t heard from Karden in days. What is going on?”
“Harker, they cracked the Elder computer code! And, they’re going to have communications channels hacked soon! It sounds like it wasn’t easy, but they did it.”
“Cracked it! That means…”
“They can get to the bottom of things. If they find anything hot, anything that reveals what the Elders might really do, are planning to do, there is going to be anarchy, or will be if we aren’t ready, which gets me to my last point.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve got word through friends that Vhel, Tarec, and Security Policy Advisor Karstens are planning to declare a state of emergency. With Tarec around that could mean anything is possible, including guns-to-the-head dictatorial craziness.”
“Wimier, that kind of thing is already blowing up in their faces.”
“I know it is, but they’ll take the country down in flames with them, and if there was ever a reason for the Elders to intervene directly, that would be it. I’m coming out of hiding to help you, pull attention away from you and hopefully rally whatever politicians there are left with brains in their heads.”
“You won’t last long.”
“No, that’s why I’m counting on Karden and the rest of your friends.”
24
Neem, Jat, Viris, and Sader were hard at work.
The lab was brightly lit and roomy, possibly the nicest space Viris had ever done hacking work in. In other company, it would have been distracting. As it was, they were monomaniacally focused. Some of Neem’s friends, aerospace and telecommunications scientists and engineers from the defense industry, and now refugees from detainment, had rigged up stealthily disguised communication dishes throughout Bacchara. They were busy monitoring communications by the Elders.
Sader was still wearing his stained red coat, his only concession to the climate of Bacchara being that he now wore it with short pants. He looked up at the others. “Got it hacked!”
“That fast?” said Jat.
“What did you expect? I’m the best… except maybe for Viris,” Sader replied.
“This was always going to be the easier part,” said Viris, “We have a lot of scripts for this
sort of thing, and thanks to you two, a lot of computing power to throw at it. He can thank luck that he beat me by a minute or two.”
“Ok then,” said Jat, “now let’s see if we can trace down those Elder spy satellites.”
What followed involved as much subterfuge as technology. Jat had drawn on his worldwide network of friends, or at least admirers, in the sciences. Astronomers in various disciplines had been cross-referencing data in great secrecy. Tadine scientists were living in fear, but even those elsewhere were leery of antagonizing the Elders. However, there were still those willing to take a chance, and help.
“Another one!” said Neem, reviewing findings along with Jat. “They’re amazingly clever about it. Signals so faint our equipment wasn’t likely to pick them up unless we were specifically looking for them, transmitted to and from stations hidden in nondescript rocks in space.”
Jat did not look up from his work, “And the signals repeat. Make sure THEY get them. Space is big. Easy to miss the target or get lost.”
“If you look at the way they cycle,” added Neem, “they must store the signals for a long time in those satellites. Instead of taking chances they just keep repeating until somebody sends a code to stop.”
“No. Looks like the code is automated. Oldest first. Unless they want to keep one.” replied Jat, “Those satellites have lots of memory.”
“Considering how much was on just that little holographic disc, that’s no surprise,” said Neem.
“The long distance satellites, the Interstellar wormhole transmitters… They must have to be a lot more powerful,” continued Jat.
“I wish we could get our hands on one,” said Neem.
“Don’t you mean ‘I want one’…?”
“That too.”
“I think we’re close…” said Jat.
“Yep. Last one!” finished Neem, “Ok, let’s tell the others.”
///
Tayyis and her team of newly-minted readers of the Elder language were reviewing communications transcripts in an airy upper floor room in Liberty Palace. Afternoon light reflected on the sea and glowed from the white buildings of Ais.
“Ms. Lyr… look at this one,” said a young linguist who’d come from Jayesthir.
She turned to look at his monitor. “That is… interesting.”
///
Diplomatic Central Directorate
To System 104-01.779.100.412 First Contact Mission
Ambassador Margaux
As per your request prior to mission launch, Level One Retrogression is authorized, pending reaction of indigenous population to Initial Conversion. You are pre-authorized for action at your discretion, but for purposes of recordkeeping and situation analysis, are instructed to prepare and provide contingency plan of planet-specific steps to be taken if indigenous population rejects enlightenment.
Should Retrogression become necessary, you are instructed to prepare and provide full after action report with standard written and visual documentation per revised guidelines of 11,988/11/06 ESD
Military High Command has given authorization to draw on detachments from Sector Squadrons for Sectors 100, 101, 103, 106, and 107 for your assistance as needed.
Higher levels of Retrogression will require specific authorization from the Galactic Central Presidium.
We wish you success Ambassador, your exemplary record speaks for itself.
With Honor. For Enlightenment.
Diplomatic Director Shekarau
///
She called Karden. He’d been making calls all day, establishing who they could talk to and trust, and who they couldn’t.
“Haral, we’ve got something,” she said, “Why don’t you come over and look at it.”
“On my way.”
In a moment and a quick walk down the hall, he was there.
“Level One Retrogression sounds like a deliberately bland term.” said Karden, his voice acrid, “I can guess that Initial Conversion means whether we do or do not accept the yoke around our necks.”
“And, whatever it is,” added Tayyis, “Retrogression involves getting support from several military squadrons… however many ships there might be in a squadron.”
“They arrived with twelve ships, which puts a lower limit on what it might be in total, but not an upper.”
Tayyis considered. “From context, I think the upper limit is likely to be a good many more.”
“It could. Their ships, the Warden Ships, seem geared toward planetary bombardment, so Retrogression might involve use of it.”
“And, Haral, the term itself implies a reversal, a scaling back.”
“Which could mean many things,” said Karden, “But considering what Aishwarya Anastasio had to say, I suspect what it means is bad for us.”
“Except, there are higher levels of Retrogression, so while this likely means something bad, we don’t really know how bad. Do you think this is what we’ve been looking for?”
“By itself,” he replied, “I think this lacks enough clarity and power to convince people. We need to find something with more explicit instructions. Perhaps Margaux filed his report.”
As they went on, Karden considered how routine, almost casual what was said in that message had been to the one who said it. The Elders, overlords of a galaxy, saw the fate of his entire world as nothing more than an exercise in procedure.
If “recordkeeping and situational analysis” meant what he thought it did, they could be bombed back to whatever Level One Retrogression meant, and the specifics of how it was done would be merely a case study for future exercises of the same.
Then, there was the use of the terms honor and enlightenment. To Karden, they looked out of place at the end of a document of such bureaucratic terseness, but they did not look so out of place in the broader context of conquest and domination. The Elders had an ideology to justify their mission, and they seemed to believe in it. They probably couldn’t carry on with it otherwise.
And finally, the casualness with which the Elders discussed it all, the obvious insignificance of Ground to them compared to the scale of their civilization, made him question his ideas about raising some kind of revolt out there. Had the sheer size of a galaxy, of a galactic civilization truly been real to him? What was the world, the one little world Ground, and what was he, but a refugee in hiding in a far corner of it from his own government?
He composed himself. Such trains of thought were pointless, however unlikely and however far they would have to go to achieve it, they HAD to win. What he’d just read only reinforced that. And people were counting on him. Everyone who had fled from Tadine had done so at least in part due to his ideas. In some ways, they’d worked wonders thus far.
Now was the time to keep working them.
In the hours that followed their discovery. Tayyis dedicated herself to finding Margaux’s follow up report to the disturbing instructional missive they’d discovered. She worked through the night and into the following morning. Karden napped, and when he checked in, found her still at her computer.
“Tayyis, you’re going to wear yourself out.”
“I’m not stopping until I find it.”
“Or your body rebels and you collapse.”
“I can’t let this happen… not unprepared… people have to know. If we’re going to undo what the Elders are doing, what Vhel is doing, if people are going to wake up once and for all. If we’re going to get them behind what we’ve talked about - your crazy dream of turning the tables on the Elders, Haral, I’ve got to find it...!”
And, some time later, she did.
///
System 104-01.779.100.412 First Contact Mission
To Diplomatic Central Directorate
Diplomatic Director Shekarau
Reaction of indigenous population to Initial Conversion is thus far within acceptable tolerance, with at present only one outlier subset population. It is my preliminary opinion that indigenous population will accept enlightenment and eventual integrat
ion as a Type Two Supply World.
However, should they not, per instructions given in pre-authorization for Level One Retrogression, detailed planet-specific contingency plan is attached.
Historical reference is made to Level One Retrogression conducted on comparable systems listed below.
015-01.231.986.330 - Ambassador Cambridge
073-00.314.996.025 - Ambassador Esfandyar
116-00.008.491.853 - Ambassador Thakur
For ease of reference, I have attached complete after action reports with cross-comparison.
With Honor. For Enlightenment.
Ambassador Margaux
///
Karden read it again. Margaux’s message was couched in language even more innocuous than the initial instructions sent to him. They were thankful they’d come across the former first. They might otherwise have overlooked this one.
With more than a little hesitation, he and Tayyis used scripts from Viris to decrypt the specially coded attachments. There was a tremendous amount of information, including reports and supporting documentation far too voluminous to go through quickly. They had to skim for relevant details.
The first was a set of detailed plans for the forcible reduction of the planet Ground from a technological society taking its first steps in space travel, to an agrarian one at a level comparable to that some centuries before the beginnings of the southerner industrial revolution. The reduction was to be carried out through the systematic destruction of infrastructure, from space and by forces on the ground, and killing of any who resisted.
The report phrased it in far more neutral terms, but that was what was planned.
There were strategic goals, lists of targets, analysis of levels and effectiveness of resistance, contingency plans, and logistical requirements. There were estimates of indigenous casualties, over time, with charts, and plans for the reconstruction and repopulation of the survivors, at a lower technological level and with indoctrination to make them reluctant to rising up again. All of it was expressed in neutral, technical language, except for relatively frequent lofty references to duty and enlightenment. The next three attachments however, the reports detailing actual retrogressions, were where the real hideousness underneath the language became clear.
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