by Tim C Taylor
Brunswick drew his revolver and placed it against the prisoner’s forehead.
Now Vogel did soil himself – noisily – and was close to fainting when Brunswick raised his gun and fired two shots at the recorder, shattering it into a thousand pieces.
“Why?” whispered Vogel.
“Because of what you just told me. That knowledge is probably a death sentence, although it could also be a path to riches and privileges. Either way, I don’t want my comrades caught up in it.”
“Thank you,” gasped Vogel.
It was Brunswick’s turn to raise his eyebrows. This man was truly incredible. But then, the reeve considered, the prisoner was 57 years old, which meant he had been born before the invasion. Not many of those old timers left, now. It couldn’t have been easy to adjust to the reality of the New Order.
For the first time, Brunswick felt a whiff of sympathy for the astronomer. Instead of punching him, as he had intended, Brunswick patted him on the head like a good dog. “You’re premature,” he told Vogel. “You can thank me in hell.”
— Chapter 21 —
Leon stood at attention and tried to imagine what it felt to be brave.
Come on, he told himself. You’re not dead yet, and that maniac has got to be capable of anything. Even rewarding you with high station. I’m in the Oval Office, dammit. That’s gotta count for something.
He looked around. Flanked by an exotic alien floating in a cylindrical life-support tank, the human leader of the free world stood behind an enormous wooden desk, polished to such a high albedo that it would be visible from space… if this Oval Office weren’t in the windowless basement of the old White House. The levels above ground – with the scattered and half-gnawed bones of its last defenders still in place – were left open to nature’s ravages.
In the privacy of his own mind, Leon wouldn’t even describe Governor Romulus as human. Humanoid was more accurate. He was an enormous man, bulging with muscles, but what marked him out most of all was that instead of human skin, his flesh was covered in brightly patterned scales. He looked like an exotic pet lizard, and that was what Governor Romulus was to the Hardits: a colorful pet.
What the governor meant to Leon was something that he and Brunswick were about to find out. The reeve had brought Leon all the way from ZoneCap 87 to what had once been Washington, D.C., and now stood alongside Leon, wearing the same kind of sheer hood that allowed him to breathe and see out, their faces hidden from the governor.
The governor’s face lacked the flexibility to display the full vocabulary of human body language, but his words that were starting to slur, and the highly dilated pupils, convinced Leon that the most powerful human on the planet was sky high on something.
Leon tried to look away from the governor, over to the alien. It wasn’t easy. He caught an impression of an oversized orange amoeba that had swallowed strips of silver foil, which now rippled in the alien’s circulatory system. But his eyes hurt to linger there, as if reality itself was bending around the alien like a lens.
“They can listen into my head, you know?” said the governor.
Hell, the man was mad.
Romulus gave a toothy grin. “But not as reliably as they think.”
“No, sir,” said Leon.
Romulus waved a drunken hand in the direction of Leon and the reeve. “The masks. On your heads. Not something you should worry about. For your safety as much as mine.”
He rose from his leather seat and shuffled up to the alien until he was touching its glass tank. “Secrets,” he hissed. “Everywhere, secrets. Secrets are so very dangerous, but we need them.”
“But, sir,” said the reeve. “The planet–”
“No!” screamed Romulus.
The governor leaped over his desk and confronted the reeve, the huge man’s fists clenching, but only for a few moments. Then the wildness left the governor’s eyes, and he shuffled back to perch his butt on the Oval Office desk.
“Do not say any more,” he instructed calmly. “You may say yes and you may say no. Nothing else. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes,” Brunswick and Leon agreed.
“Good. Now, I want both of you to understand that your interests are my interests. I serve the people of Earth in their entirety. Remember that. Now, you, sir.” He pointed at Leon. “In a moment, I shall show you a written statement. I want you to silently read the words, and then tell me whether you think my statement is accurate. Yes or no. Understand?”
Leon nodded.
“Okay,” said Romulus as he reached behind to grab a data pad off his desk. “Here we go.”
Tired old eyes meant he had to lean forward and peer at the words, but Leon could just about make them out. The orbit of Ceres has been altered. It will intercept Earth’s orbit in approximately six months from now.
“Yes, sir,” said Leon. “That’s what I’ve…” His words died away at the sight of the governor’s wagging finger.
“Say no more,” said Romulus. “You have done well. Both of you. Future historians will talk of this day and remember you. I fear they will also have much to say about me.” He laughed bitterly.
Leon remembered to breathe. This is going to turn out all right, he told himself. He even half believed it.
Romulus grimaced and glanced back at the alien in the tank. He shook his head at the creature. “No, there are some things I can’t ask others to do. Not even you.”
He sat back into his chair at the far side of the desk and took something from a drawer.
A sinking feeling clawed at Leon’s gut, who was convinced the scene in his kitchen when he’d been shot was repeating itself. Sure enough, the governor raised a gun over the desk.
The governor held it like a pistol, but it was a great brute of a killing machine, constructed from dull metal and with a stubby bulb beneath. Leon doubted he could lift it in both his hands. Whatever it was, this wouldn’t be firing tracker pellets.
With a whine and a pop, something shot out of the gun barrel and ripped through the man standing next to Leon.
The reeve fell down. Leon couldn’t help but stare at the blood pooling beneath Brunswick’s body. So much blood. “Why?” asked Leon, unable to take his gaze from the dead man.
“I told you,” said Romulus. With a start, Leon realized that Romulus was standing in front of him. “They’re in here,” he explained, tapping the side of his head.
Then he tapped Leon’s head. “Maybe in there too.”
The madman made no sense, but he had left his gun on the desk. “It’s okay,” he told Leon in a whisper. “I love all my subjects, including you, Leon Vogel. I am the Leader of the Free World.” He giggled. “The title is a Hardit joke, of course.”
“No,” said Leon. “It’s an honorable title with an honorable history.”
“Honor? Silly little man. I have no honor. I have no soul, no hope, no friends, no future.” He dropped his head. “No love and no brother. I can only quit this role when I’m dead, but I can’t even die. Not yet. You, though, have given me hope, little man. You have given me an end date. Come here!”
Incredibly, Governor Romulus, Leader of the Free World and Chief Servant of the Hardit New Order, opened his bearlike arms and invited Leon in for a hug.
Leon swallowed hard and put his arms halfway around the big man.
“Six months,” Romulus whispered into his ear as he brought his arms around Leon’s skeletal body. “Six months before I can finally quit. You, my friend… Your release comes sooner. You can go now.”
Leon flinched. But the governor released Leon from his embrace and took a half step back.
“Thank you,” he said into the governor’s magnanimous face.
Romulus was a giant of a man, and whatever intoxication ran through his bloodstream meant that by now he was swaying wildly. So Leon’s final thought was one of utter astonishment to see the governor move with such lightning speed as he grabbed the astronomer’s head and gave it a sharp twist.
&nbs
p; — Chapter 22 —
Romulus watched the astronomer’s body slump to the carpeted floor. He had been a foolish man. Intelligent, yet naive. The reeve was more interesting. Selfish, and yet he had cut the evidence trail to protect his comrades. Unwittingly, he had also protected Romulus. Many others may yet benefit from the caution of Senior Reeve Justin Brunswick.
Free Earth would honor them both, Romulus hoped. He sighed. If Earth were to be free, it would be a future he would never live to see.
He replaced the gun in his desk drawer and pulled out an ampule that he attached to a clean needle and injected into the top of his thigh. He felt warm, comforting sensations spread through his body and into his mind – the welcome fuzziness that explained away his actions and reassured him that he was doing the right thing, even though he could never remember why. Tomorrow he would wake with only a dim memory of the events of this day.
There had been so many missing memories in recent months. He hoped they’d been sacrificed for a worthwhile cause, but he had long ago lost the thread of his life, instead stumbling from one day to the next without a guide.
Six months?
It sounded impossibly distant, but he’d survive the way he always had: one day at a time.
A hover trolley appeared through the service door. Had he ordered it? Or had it been the alien? He shrugged. Didn’t matter. Didn’t want to know. “The price of knowledge is death,” he mumbled. As the astronomer had learned, for the human survivors of the New Order occupation, ignorance was the only defense.
He picked up the two bodies with ease and trudged off to the incinerator, nearly tripping over the cleaner robots who had arrived to remove the bloodstains and the forensic trail.
Hurry! he heard in his head.
Romulus halted instead. It was confusing when the Night Hummer spoke directly into his mind…
He blinked… realizing he’d blacked out for a few seconds.
Where was he?
He took in his surroundings and saw two men lying on a trolley. Corpses, by the look of them. He couldn’t remember who they were or why they were dead, but he knew enough to realize what must be done.
He hurried along the familiar route to the incinerator before his mind snagged on a distraction or was lost in Nirvana.
The incinerator room was closer than he remembered, but then they had moved it closer recently, hadn’t they? He couldn’t remember why. His mind was starting to scout out the question of why he needed an incinerator at all to perform his duties, when he was distracted by his reflection in the window set into the metal incinerator door. The Governor of Earth had a smile on his face, but he didn’t know why.
—— PART III ——
RAINBOW
BRIDGE
— Chapter 23 —
Five years earlier…
“Are you serious?”
General Foster was the only one to voice his incredulity, but Arun knew the other commanders floating with him in space silently felt the same.
Deeply ingrained human instincts made him look for the others’ body language, but it was a waste of time.
To begin with, of the nine other field marshals, generals, and admirals, there was a Jotun, Littorane, Tallerman, Gliesan, and Night Hummer. Of the three other humans present, Admiral Indiya had largely shut down emotionally after killing thousands of her shipmates in the mutiny that had given birth to the Human Legion. And one other – his personal bodyguard – was impossible to read through her outer coating of colorful Ginquin scales, which admittedly suited Arun well because the woman sworn to protect him hated his guts.
Arun sighed. He was getting too old for this. “Yes, General Foster, I am entirely serious.”
“Then my hearing must be faulty,” snapped the human general. “I thought you said your plan is to sneak up on the Hardits with a frakking planet.”
“Ceres is a dwarf planet,” corrected General Graz, perpetuating the Tallerman reputation for pedantry.
“Which means its mass is more manageable for our purposes,” added Indiya. “Plus, it’s the only large enough body close to Earth with such an inclined orbit. It’s not on the elliptical plane, and we know Hardit sensors are concentrated along the elliptic.”
“Again,” said Foster. “You’re planning to sneak in unawares with a planet. I don’t care if it’s an undersized one, it’s still a frakking planet! Is no one else thinking that’s just a little ambitious?”
“The gremlins can’t extend the range of their Rainbow Bridge any farther,” said General Aureanus, the Gliesan who had taken over liaison with the tricky but brilliant race of engineers, after the previous liaison – Phaedra ‘Springer’ Tremayne – had been sacrificed to the White Knight Cull. “They say they are hitting a theoretical limit, not an engineering issue. Which means that if we are to pivot the bridge on an orbital body, then that body must draw closer to Earth than the natural orbit of Ceres.”
“We’ve used the momentum-bleed technology on X-Boats for generations,” said Arun. “Now we need to take that technology to a new level. Imagine an array of uprated X-Boat energy radiators buried inside Ceres. Over the course of years, they could be enough to change its orbit, to direct the planetoid to our command.”
“Months,” came the voice of the Night Hummer in their heads. “The longer it takes to erect the bridge, the more strength we give to futures in which the enemy discovers us.”
“Months?” queried Arun. “I don’t care. The closest approach Ceres makes to Earth is 2739. However quickly we can do this, we count back from that closest approach and begin operations then.”
“Months,” repeated the Hummer. “It will be done.” The Hummer shared data it had previously prepared, showing both the natural orbit of Ceres, and how it might be adjusted for use as a strong point to launch an attack on Earth.
The inward arc of the bridge would point at the inner Solar System, passing within a whisker of Earth on the target date in 2739. Meanwhile, the bridge’s outer arc would move through a barren void south of the ecliptic. If the New Order’s southern sensor stations could be destroyed as part of a preliminary operation that focused the enemy’s attention on a diversionary attack, then a small concealed task force could funnel people and equipment across the bridge and onto Ceres. Secrecy would be paramount. How could Arun deliver all of this without involving someone in the operation who was one of Tawfiq’s spies? Just one spy and anyone entering the Rainbow Bridge would be walking into a Hardit trap.
The Legion had suffered much in the war through New Order infiltration. It was an infection – the Blood Virus they called it – but no one really knew how it worked, just that the Hardits knew far too many of the Legion’s plans, and proximity to the Hummers seem to counteract its effect. The Legion command group was sheltered inside the sphere of Hummers who had coalesced their bodies to screen the secret talks within. If any of them were infected, then the moment they stepped outside, the information would begin its journey to the enemy.
“According to this plan,” said Aureanus, “the Rainbow Bridge will still be too far away to assault Earth orbit.”
“The bridge will be lengthened,” said the Hummer.
“As I explained, my team says that is not possible,” the Gliesan protested.
“The bridge shall be lengthened.”
“Are you saying you’ve foreseen this?” Arun asked the Hummer.
“The plan must be followed.” The streamers inside the alien’s amorphous body lengthened and flapped in an increased flow of bubbles. Arun had learned to interpret this as a shift in perspective, the precognitive alien withdrawing its mental perspective from the future, and separating itself out from the group mind constructed from individuals of its kind spread over many light years.
In other words, the Hummer was trying to think down to the level of dumb humans. “We cannot foresee this,” explained the creature. “Our precognition is being actively blocked by the enemy, but we believe this is the best route. We are still over a
light year from Earth. There is time enough to make improvements to the Rainbow Bridge design”
Crossing his arms, Arun took his time to regard the Hummer. What was their game? What weren’t they telling him this time?
“We give you legitimacy in the eyes of the Trans-Species Union,” said the alien.
The words were like a sucker punch to the gut, a reminder of the Legion’s weakness. The Trans-Species Union ran on the principle of the rule of law, backed up by the justified terror all races and polities had for anyone who thought themselves so powerful that they could ignore their treaty agreements. Earth had signed legally binding treaties with the White Knights, but the Hummers, it had transpired, were themselves an offshoot of the White Knight people. If humanity were to survive, they needed the backing of the Hummers, because they needed the Emperor to know that if he caused too much trouble, the Legion would kick his ass again and install the Hummers in his place.
Interstellar politics were infinitely complex.
Those who played it wrong condemned their races to extinction.
And those who were too weak or unwilling to play sentenced their races to perpetual slavery.
“You gave us your oath, Arun McEwan.”
“I did so. And I hold by my oath still. We remain allies.”
The alien floated impassively in its tank. Did Arun’s words make it happy? Arun didn’t know whether the blobs were capable of such a thing as emotion, but he did know he couldn’t trust them. Desperation had driven both sides to be mutual allies, but Hummers had been preparing the way for the Legion’s advance for a very long time – since before humans made first contact with aliens. Maybe a long time before that.
Arun’s goal was to liberate Earth and then manage a peaceful transition to civilian control of the new Human Autonomous Region. But what of the Hummers and their goals? They wanted a home world, far from the White Knight Emperor, but did their plans stop there? Unlikely. Conflict with the Night Hummers was a hypothetical nightmare for a future he would probably never see. First, they must liberate the Earth.
