The Majority and Minority Leaders each indicated agreement.
“Thank you everyone for coming. Dismissed.”
36 Earth
Vancouver, EASC Headquarters
Miriam found Alamatto sitting placidly at his desk, shoulders squared and head high as he performed a stellar imitation of reviewing materials on said desk. Her entry had doubtless been announced sufficiently in advance for him to compose himself.
“Admiral, what can I do—”
“Close the door.”
If he took offense at what was clearly an order, he gave no indication. It wasn’t insubordination, strictly speaking; he may be her boss but he did not outrank her. The door slid shut in a faint whirr.
She motioned him silent with a terse slash of her hand. “You and I have our differences, but I’ve consistently respected your military judgment. If anything I’ve found it too conservative. But this is beyond the pale. How could you authorize such an action?”
“I di—”
“We killed children, Price! I recognize why you saw fit not to inform me of your intentions, as I would have objected in the most strenuous terms—”
“Miriam, I didn’t authorize the strike.”
“I am not gullible, Price. Neither am I a fool.”
All the air left his lungs in a laborious breath; with it his shoulders sagged and carefully fabricated expression collapsed. Stripped of the poise, he appeared a beaten man, small in the oversized chair. “I swear to you—I did not authorize the strike.”
Her head tilted a mere fraction. “There is no one else who could authorize such an action.”
He forced out a jittery laugh and gazed up at her. She had not availed herself of any of the chairs opposite his desk, and the height advantage added to the impression she was now in charge here. It was not an inaccurate impression.
“The Prime Minister can. Arguably. At least he retains a Statement of Position from his Attorney General saying he can.”
Her mouth descended into a small frown at that. “Brennon? He has no military experience—why would he keep you out of the loop?”
“Maybe because he knows, like you, I would object. He’s denying responsibility, though he doesn’t need to. But who else is there?”
“Defense Minister Mori might counsel Brennon to take this sort an action, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out so far as to attempt it himself.” She paced along the front of his desk, hands clasped behind her back. “Have you considered the possibility we’re dealing with renegade officers further down the chain of command?”
He sank lower into the chair. “Oh, Miriam….”
“You know there are segments of the officer corps who continue to harbor significant animosity toward the Federation.”
“I’ve always counted you among them.”
She made it a point to keep her personal feelings separate from her professional judgment, to project an impression of objectivity. She liked to think she was in fact objective. Still, the world expected her to harbor a degree of animosity toward the Federation, and it had not been difficult to oblige them.
“In some respects I am. But I am also a realist. I’ve seen the costs of war and do not desire to repeat them. And I would never provoke a war by blowing up a school full of children, thereby painting us as the evildoer from the start.”
“Technically they provoked it with the assassination.”
A dismissive wave landed in his general direction. “An assassination of a mid-level diplomat is hardly reason enough to start a galactic war. Sanctions for certain, perhaps a blockade—but not war. However, others may have seen it as an opportunity to right old wrongs. Others who are more hot-headed than rational.” Unlike me went unsaid. “It is possible the assassination spurred such individuals to take matters into their own hands.”
“Rogue officers—even entire units—committing offensive operations without authorization because they’re angry? What a disaster….”
He went over to his cabinet, poured a glass of water and gulped down half of it, then scowled at the glass as if he had expected it to provide something far stronger. “It will look like I can’t control my own officers, like I’m unable to command discipline and obedience from the rank and file. Brennon will have my head.”
And he should, because you cannot. Price had invariably proven a weak leader, too eager to foster harmony and accord and unwilling to make the difficult decisions or stand behind them on the rare occasions when he did. It was a management style which had served him well enough in a time of peace, yet was wholly unsuitable for the discord which marched in lockstep with armed conflict.
Whether at Brennon’s ‘request’ or due to his own implosion, the prospect of him lasting the year in his current post was low and decreasing by the hour. She began making plans to distance herself from him, quietly and without fanfare. She would not actively work to bring him down, but she owed him no duty to fall upon her own sword on his behalf.
“I believe the Prime Minister has more pressing concerns at the moment than your head. Most notably, the fact that we appear to be on the verge of another war. The Senecan Chairman is consulting his senior advisors as we speak—and I don’t believe we should expect a peaceful outcome.”
He stared at her, bleak desperation in his eyes…and she realized any self-assurance which resulted from his position, family heritage or even experience had abandoned him with the advent of the crisis. He looked as frightened as an FNG on his first orbital drop.
“I’m meeting Brennon and the cabinet in six hours. What do I tell them? What do I say?”
She smiled thinly. “Only you can decide your best course of action. If you are asking my advice, I suggest you tell them the truth.”
37 Siyane
Metis Nebula, Inner Bands
“Would you shut up for two seconds and listen to me?”
Alex cringed at the frayed edges and shrill pitch of her voice. She sounded hysterical. Hell, she felt hysterical. If it weren’t for the fact she’d never been hysterical in her life—other than on the day her father died—odds are she would be hysterical.
They had run. They were still running.
She hadn’t wanted to engage the sLume drive at first, worried the notable expansion and contraction of the fabric of space might be detected, and god only knew how fast those alien ships were capable of flying. But she’d thrown so much power at the dampener field on their retreat the field’s module had overloaded and fried out. Thankfully the silica-sapphire matrix filter caught the backflow and prevented any damage to the LEN reactor.
Figuring an unmasked full-power impulse engine was likely to attract at least as much attention as initiating a warp bubble, she had relented and switched over to vanish at superluminal velocity. Thus far no alien ships had trailed her to blow her out of space.
Beyond its designated requirements, feeding more power to the sLume drive did not result in greater speed. The limit to how rapidly it propelled her and her ship through space was built into the design of the drive, and no amount of power in creation could make it go any faster. So she’d also turned the heat and lights back on.
She would lessen the frequency she dropped out of superluminal. Two days in between particle dumps should be fine, so long as she did so far outside any outpost of civilization. She’d run the sLume at 100% instead of the 95% she typically did to minimize wear and tear. Together with high-tailing it out of Metis at full speed from the start rather than meandering around on impulse as she’d done coming in—and the fact she intended to acquire herself a goddamn superluminal travel waiver for inside the Main Asteroid Belt—and she should be able to trim nearly a day and a half off the trip home.
Three and a half days had never seemed so long.
But it wasn’t three and a half days. As soon as she escaped Metis communications would return. She could warn people. She could get the information to her mother, who could get it to those who mattered, and they could…deal with it.
&
nbsp; The Earth Alliance armed forces were very capable. Certainly they were very large. Not state of the art, but reasonably advanced. Were they strong enough? She imagined it depended on how many ships were still to come through the portal. Perhaps if the Alliance cooperated with Senecan forces—she cut a glance over to evaluate the state of her Senecan companion.
His jaw had locked in place, and his eyes were flaring as hot as the bright blue core of Messier 32. But his expression was one of…of pained patience, which only made her want to strangle him more. At least he had acquiesced in one respect—he shut up. She should probably start talking before her two seconds ran out.
“I am not trying to allow genocide to be committed upon your ‘people.’ I am not leaving them to the wolves, to those…things, okay? I realize Seneca and its friends lie directly in the way of any path to Earth and are located substantially closer to Metis.”
She forced herself not to pace in a manner which might be interpreted as hysterical. “The instant communications return, you can comm your boss or your President or Chairman or whatever it is you call him or her. Comm whoever the hell you desire. Send the visuals—send the entire fucking data set. Talk to them for hours. Whatever you feel you need to do to prepare them is fine by me. I want you to warn them.
“All I am saying is I’m going to Earth, and I’m not taking a two-day detour to Seneca on the way.”
He sank back with a sharp sigh against the wall behind the data center, where she had been pulling in the information captured and trying to begin to organize and categorize it while they raced at maximum speed away from the center of Metis and its otherworldly portal and army of monster ships.
That was earlier though. Before the argument.
He had assumed they would be heading to Seneca forthwith to warn his government of the danger in person. A logical enough assumption she supposed, given Senecan space extended practically to the outskirts of the Metis Nebula and thus its inhabitants may be in a wee bit of clear and present danger.
She wasn’t going to Seneca. She didn’t care to go there when things were peachy, much less when aliens were knocking on the door. For one, on Seneca she’d be dependent on him and not even remotely in control of her situation. For another, she possessed a direct line to the highest ranks of the Alliance military; she needed to get to Earth and if necessary yell and scream at her mother and her mother’s bosses and anyone and everyone else required until they understood the magnitude of the fucking problem. And she had no time to waste.
The shock of witnessing an invading army of unimaginably powerful aliens emerging through an unfathomably advanced portal had left them both on edge and not exactly at their best. When he had expressed his assumption regarding their destination, she had protested. He had misinterpreted. Words had ensued.
After seeming to search her face for a moment, as if for reassurance of the truth of her statements, his chin dropped to his chest. It was followed several seconds later by a weak nod. “Okay. I hear you. And I’m…sorry I accused you of being insensitive.”
“I believe the term you used was ‘soulless’?”
“Right.” A desperate-sounding breath escaped his lips. “All of those ideas sound reasonable, and I’ll likely do most of them. But what then?” He looked up at her from beneath long lashes, his gaze less hard but no less troubled. “Where does that leave me?”
She dropped her hands to the rim of the table and leaned into it, allowing her eyes to drift down rather than hold his. “Look, if you want I can drop you off on Gaiae. I know it’s small and the residents are kind of creepy, but it has a spaceport and regular transports. You can get home from there. It’ll cost me four hours or so, but I’ll compensate somehow.”
Unable to resist any longer the pull of his stare boring into her, she raised her head to again meet his gaze. “I’m sorry, but we have no time. It’s the best I can do.”
“Thank you. I—Gaiae will be fine.”
The corners of his mouth twitched but exhibited no definitive direction, forcing his jaw to relinquish its clench of death. His Adam’s apple bobbed a heavy swallow. “You said ‘if I want.’ Is there an alternative? Are you asking me to go to Earth with you?”
She opened her mouth to respond…and let it close. That was precisely what she was doing, wasn’t it? Well.
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Why?” A few hours earlier the tenor of his voice would’ve been playful, even teasing, when uttering such a question. Now it was somber and dark, weighed down by responsibility and the dread which came with terrible knowledge.
Why, indeed. Her eyes slid away from the intensity of his stare, and she made a show of inspecting the checkerboard of data sets spread out above the table. “Two voices are better than one. I stand a better chance of not being deemed crazy if you back me up. Yes, I recognize I have hard data to back me up. Still, you’d be shocked at how little bureaucrats respect hard data.”
“Is that all?”
Stop. Please. This was a conversation she was so far from ready to have. “Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not being an ass. I’m simply asking if there’s another reason why you want me to go with you.”
She ignored him and expanded the set containing the visible light images. “I need to get this data into some semblance of order so we can send it along as soon as we’re clear of the Nebula. It’s still in raw form and a jumbled mess right now.”
After a moment’s pause—she didn’t know what he may have done or what expressions he may have displayed during the moment, because she didn’t look at him—he joined her at the table.
“We need to do a lot more than organize it. I barely comprehend half of this, and most people won’t understand any of it. Presentation matters. We need to structure the data so it tells a story, one which is compelling and easy to understand in a couple of minutes.”
Her eyes cut over at him. “We?”
For the briefest second the trademark smirk returned. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Touché.”
He sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose, then pulled her gaze in once again. “Listen. I would…I would like to go to Earth with you. I don’t know if I will be able to do so. There’s a good chance once my superiors see this information they’re going to ask me to come in. And while I enjoy a significant amount of freedom in my job, in this situation I won’t be able to say no.”
She nodded, possibly too quickly. It felt too quick. “Of course. We’ll play it by ear. If it takes them a while to decide I’ll need to drop you on New Orient instead, but I can make it work. It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine at all, but she told herself she had far more important problems to worry about right now. Like how to break the news to the world—or at least its rulers—that the elusive aliens everyone had been searching for had at last been found, and they most decidedly did not appear friendly.
38 Arcadia
Earth Alliance Colony
Arcadia’s orbital defense array detected the approaching ships at a distance of 0.2 AU beyond its outer atmosphere.
The detection was expected. The commander of the 3rd Wing made no attempt to hide the force’s arrival, as it was futile to try. A flight of stealth electronic warfare ships deployed in an advance position and began scrambling the array sensors, introducing errors into their targeting mechanics. A number of bolts from the enormous plasma weapons nevertheless reached the frigates forming the bulk of the Wing.
Long, dark and sleek, Senecan Federation frigates stretched for one hundred forty meters. They were constructed of a lustrous amodiamond metamaterial which absorbed and reflected the steel blue glow of their powerful twin impulse engines. Plasma shielding and reinforced layered p-graphene lattices deflected and dispersed the majority of the high-energy plasma, though in the opening seconds two frigates suffered critical damage from direct hits and were forced to disengage. The remaining frigates targeted the orbital weapons infrastructure and drew its fire while th
ree fighter squadrons launched from the Wing’s carrier ship.
The Arcadia Earth Alliance Forward Naval Base went on full alert the moment the defense array picked up the approaching ships. Fighters were scrambled to guard the mouths of the nearby atmosphere corridors and patrol the surrounding airspace. Eight SAL turrets ringing the facility activated and began searching for targets.
The Senecan squadrons didn’t take the corridors however, for to do so would have been to fly directly into a massacre. Instead they battled the punishing atmosphere in nine flights of four, each flight closing in on the base from different directions and altitude.
Arcadia’s topography was mountainous and lush, and the base lay nestled in a vale at the northern end of a long valley. The valley entrance was heavily guarded by automated systems, and four of the eight SAL turrets were positioned along the gap in the mountains. Drones dispatched with the 2nd flight broke off to engage the turrets, while the accompanying fighters followed three seconds behind to eliminate the automated defenses.
Senecan fighter jets possessed exceptional maneuverability, even in-atmosphere. Constructed of a hyper-light honeycombed metamaterial and sculpted into sharp edges and acute lines, they sacrificed non-electronic defenses for speed and agility. The jets raced over the mountains bounding three sides of the base, braked to a near stop at the crests and dropped into the vale, pulse laser weapons firing in long arcs through the surface facilities.
The offensive did not go unchallenged; in fact it was met with considerable resistance. Alliance fighters engaged the attackers in the sky above the base. Ships on both sides suffered catastrophic damage, the fiery wreckage often causing yet more damage to the facilities upon impact with the ground.
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