Such an argument, Bryan knew, was valid. Variations of continental economic unions rose and fell throughout the 21st century, filling in the gaps between the third and fourth world wars and the Super Depression of the ’70s. But it was the combined consequences of global economic ruin late in the century and the exorbitant price tag of the colonial space program that allowed the economic communities to establish an unprecedented foothold. Their radical yet successful fiscal doctrines shaped international policy, punched mortal holes in the colonial program and gained something governments lost generations ago – the trust of the people.
“We let it happen. It’s our own fault,” Bryan whispered between puffs. “We just got out of the way and let them have everything.”
Bryan couldn’t recall a single military response to assimilation by the ECs. Not one missile, not one tank. Oh, sure. There were protests from the extremists, the occasional terrorist bombing, a few U.S. senators blowing holes through their heads on the Capitol steps.
There was a sociologist, he remembered, who claimed to have an easy explanation for the gentle transition. “Kurenchau,” Bryan muttered. “Oliver goddamn Kurenchau! No-spine propagandist.”
Kurenchau, who coined the term that became the EC maxim – Universal Homogeneity – put it simply: “At long last, we as a people have exhausted ourselves of war, disease, poverty, prejudice, social strife and greed. We are exhausted, and we see no need to be different any longer.”
On more than one occasion, Bryan wondered how the underground possibly hoped to fight such mentality – even with a contact well-placed in the PAC. “People like it like this,” he mumbled. “Never mind how much blood was shed to make it happen or how much we shed to keep it intact. God help them, they like it!”
“Sir?” A young man’s voice distracted him, and Bryan realized he’d been opening his mouth.
“Sorry, son,” he told the soldier who stopped him. “I get that way before the big meetings. Keep on!”
The soldier, perhaps 17, saluted his commander-in-chief. He was a member of the Front Guard, decked out in the traditional black-and-red body armor, an M1-40 blast rifle slung over his shoulder.
Even in perfection there is a disease, Bryan thought as he returned the salute. He always tried his best to miss eye contact with the soldiers – he preferred it when the AFD was staffed only with regional police.
The Front Guard presence wasn’t overt – a soldier every couple of blocks – but enough to keep problem children in line.
Nevertheless, Bryan rebuked himself for his lack of discretion, and decided he needed to change his attitude before reaching the Center for Domestic Security. He tried to reacquaint himself with the sights, sounds and fragrances of an AFD morning.
Along the sidewalk's edge, there were ornate and precisely arranged kettledrums from which flowed English roses, confederate jasmine and clematis, forced into early bloom. Women snipped some of the roses and attaching the cuttings to their sarongs. The night posts, which became automated street symphonies at sunrise, emitted the words of poets and the ballads of Fourth Age violinists. At the top of many such posts were the neo-classical sculptures of 21st-century heroes and martyrs – U.S. presidents Emilio Rocha, Stanley Channing and Leonora Quinsby among them. Mobile vendors peddled slowly, hawking the latest amping software, kitschy cummerbunds and tools that could only be effective in the sexual adventure clubs.
He looked through the big, open windows of insta-hair salons, which were often quite hectic this time of day, and from which a new craze in styles emerged monthly. And he was enticed, as always, by the citizens seated on benches engaged in full-scale viop.
Their attention was lost in three-dimensional vioptric holograms displayed inches before their faces. At this time of day, Bryan assumed, they were probably reviewing much of the same information he accessed earlier on MassGrid, with the exception being they chose to use their Fountains for visual display, isolating many of the reports for in-depth coverage.
Bryan preferred using his Fountain for recreational pleasures. Intricate three-dimensional games – some erotic – provided a needed distraction for hours at a time. If he wanted to see MassGrid reports in vid, he preferred to uplink the data to a workstation or wall cyclorama for larger presentation. It wasn’t the kind of detail he cared to have in a 12-inch cube directly in front of his eyes.
He could make a comfortable life on a little food, a little water, and his Fountain. He figured most people could, and that was the heart of the problem.
It’d be all too easy, he thought. Get lost in the stream and never return to reality!
In fact, there were many people who still considered the creation of the biomechanical implant known as the stream chip to be man’s greatest achievement. It made MassGrid possible, which made the Fountain a viable tool. And in less than 30 years, 95 percent of the human population embraced it.
For all that Bryan despised about his world, he did take great pleasure in the diversion of the stream.
The Center for Domestic Security was located on the northern tier of the PAC's federal government quad, standing on the site once occupied by the state capitol building of Georgia. The glass tower rose from the surface as an inverted pyramid, clearing stands of old Georgia pines and soaring 30 stories high before intersecting a dome-shaped buttress that acted as a giant canopy and as a functional support. Looking much like the world's largest sheet, billowing on the wings of a gust of wind, the buttress reached out and down through the pines, four powerful arms disappearing between the trees and holding the corners of the sheet solidly to the Earth. For that architectural distinction, this was the building unofficially known as “Dome.”
And it was where, in a large office on the northwest corner of the 27th floor, Bryan retreated.
Of all those perks that came with his position as the most powerful law enforcement officer in the PAC, none compared to the satisfaction – and often solitude – he found in this 20-by-20 meter temple to corporate power.
He saw the city in panoramic glory from a position behind his workstation. The north and west were all glass, the windows inclining outward at 15 degrees, the nearest arm of the buttress extending too far outward from Dome to obstruct the view. And when he cared to enjoy the architectural masterpieces that dominated the government quad to his east and south, not a problem – the computer-generated cyclorama spanning those walls offered a real-time window to complete the spectacle.
The center of the office dropped into a shallow well, three steps down to enough comfort that he could have all but lived here. When Bryan finally returned from the overtrial, this is where he headed – avoiding the backlog of reports awaiting him at his workstation. He reviewed the stock that filled a shelf inside a handsome bar and poured himself a double shot of vodka. He closed his left hand tightly around the glass and into a wide and deep leather sofa.
He took a sip.
“Matilda?”
“YES, BRYAN?”
“Could you play something very soft?”
“PREFERENCE OF COMPOSER?”
Bryan grinned. One of the best things he did as security chief was add remote units of his LifeSquire to both his office and his personal business Sprint, which was parked a few levels above. But there were times he wished Matilda would simply take the initiative and respond to a broad request rather than insist upon specifics.
“I don't know,” he whispered. “Chopin, Hovhaness, Zephirion. Anything really.”
“VERY GOOD, I WILL ...”
Matilda went silent, giving way to a signature twang.
“Enter,” Bryan said, and the office door opened.
The bald man who entered with a snappy gait made a direct line for Bryan, who took another sip of vodka before acknowledging his aide with a nod.
“Good morning, sir,” the aide kept a broad smile. “I apologize for having missed you when you arrived. Have you had a chance to review your revised schedule for today?�
�
“Revised? Um, no. Haven't even been to my workstation.”
“Then it's especially good I caught up with you. Council President Travert will be here for a meeting with all division supervisors in 90 minutes.”
“Strange. When he asked for this meeting, did he offer a reason?”
“He contacted us an hour ago. Wanted to speak to you directly of course, but he understood when I told him where you were. He didn't offer a reason, but he insisted this conference was to be voce.”
Bryan didn't know what to make of this. In six years, he had been involved in just three voice-only conferences, and each of them had been on matters of the highest security issues. But none had been with Sir Jonathan Travert, President of the Senior Council and thus, the leader of the Pan American Community.
“Executive Boardroom?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fair enough. I'll wait on the president.”
Once the aide was gone, Bryan threw back the rest of the vodka. He knew exactly what each shot of vodka would do for him. The first offered relaxation, comfort. The second enticed him to roll up his sleeves. The third made him say what he really felt. As he awaited the president's arrival, he consciously avoided the third shot. What liquor he already had flowing in his blood – combined with the violin sonata by Noel Zephirion that Matilda played for him during the next hour – was the sustenance he needed to face Sir Jonathan Travert.
The most powerful man in the PAC arrived at Dome precisely on schedule, entered the Executive Boardroom without so much as a crack of a gracious smile, and took his seat to face the six supervisors who gathered to hear him. He lifted a hand, rolled his tongue against a forefinger, then raised that finger as if he were determining the direction of the wind. Bryan, seated at the opposite end of the long, black table, nodded in understanding – it was simple code for “is this room screened for voce use only?”
And then this tall, full man with a nattily-cropped head of hair that seemed to flow down upon his face into a thin beard, addressed the PAC's highest security officers.
“Ladies, gentlemen. I intend to get right to the gist of the matter. Andorran has returned.”
Travert sat back in his seat, paused as if for some kind of dramatic effect. The silence that followed was brief. After jaws fell open and eyes ballooned to something that was a cross between the vacant gaze of death and what would be expected if God were to suddenly materialize, there was a gasp from one of the supervisors. Someone else muttered, “Incredible.”
Bryan Drenette felt cold. What little remained of the liquor turned his stomach into an undulating reservoir of nausea, a cesspool of raw eggs slip-sliding over each other en masse.
Despite twenty-two years of planning he was paralyzed.
10
L
ogic told Lara Singer to resign her command and hand it over to Daniel. The crew respected him, knew he understood the mechanics of Andorran and could make an executive decision quickly and without consultation. Yet she accepted that this command had to stay with her – she was not about to let down her future husband.
Lara smiled. “A few more hours,” she said under her breath, then turned to Mifuro Nakahita.
“Are you receiving anything?”
Mifuro removed an earplug and frowned. “It's odd, captain. As I anticipated, we have drawn within sufficient range to detect ground transmissions on the planet. And there are many of them, no question of that. The quandary is that all these transmissions are jumbled, as if they were ...” he paused, words on the edge of his lips. “As if they were coded, then intertwined with other transmissions.”
“Any theories?” Daniel asked.
“The most logical is that I've been listening to an entirely different form of communication than the ship's technology can translate.”
“Is there anything else you can try?” Daniel asked. “Or have you run the gamut?”
“I believe I have,” Mifuro said weakly.
“What kind of communications have you been monitoring?”
“Very basic. Vidport, vioptrics primarily.”
“Satellite?”
“So far, I've found no orbital activity other than weather trackers. And even those transmissions are jumbled.”
He turned and addressed Mifuro and Fran, who sat stoically through this conversation, unusual for her. “Do either of you recall hearing of any emerging comm technologies before we left Earth? Something revolutionary? A next-generation concept?”
Fran needed no time. “Not me, Dan. At least, nothing that could get off the drawing board in the next hundred years. And if it existed – officially anyway – I would have known. I always made a point of hooking into the viop Technet a minimum two hours every day.” She dropped a self-mocking laugh. “Guess I didn't want some other bastard getting the step on me when it came to symbio R&D.”
Mifuro concurred. “I know of nothing in development. There were theories, of course. But there have always been theories.”
“While I got you here, Dan,” Fran interrupted, “thought you'd want to check this.”
He scanned a long sequence of numbers on a schematic over her workstation. “Looks like your anomaly in the stasis chamber is back,” she added.
Daniel leaned over Fran's shoulder, studied the numbers a second time. “Damn! Any idea what could be causing it?”
“Can't figure it. I ran a comparison with the sequence you logged in several days ago, and it's almost identical. Don't know where it's coming from. If I had to guess, I’d say it's an aberration in the hydrothermic regulators. It's definitely nothing organic.”
Daniel clinched his teeth. “When the computer spotted this the first time, I went on the theory that cellular decay had begun in the specimen. I pegged it as a temporary glitch during deceleration.”
Fran nodded. “Logical approach. It's normal to expect flickers in some of the primary circuits during any transfer into or out of sublight. But you found nothing concrete to support your theory?”
“No. I went directly to the agripod, did a manual diagnostic of the entire stasis chamber. Normal readings throughout.”
“Hmmph. This is certainly no flicker, and no sign of cellular decay. The anomaly's been holding for more than five minutes.”
Daniel turned to Lara, and she shuttered. She knew he'd be going down there. She despised that chamber. “Has to be a fluctuation in the regulators,” he told her softly. “Could be the start of a system failure, and we've brought that damn thing too far to allow disintegration to set in. We need to have a perfect specimen for Earth study.”
“And it may be nothing,” she replied.
“True. But if it is the regulators, I won't need more than 30 minutes.”
Lara offered her most cooperative smile. She knew there was no risk to Daniel. In fact, a viop unit would do most of the work.
She looked at the monitor above Fran's workstation, and she saw a shot of the agripod's specimen vault. The screen was filled with two rows of long white shelves, upon each of them dozens of ovoid metal capsules. But her eyes traveled beyond the specimen containers, and focused instead on three wall units, each with an octagonal door of opaque glass. Next to each door was a vertical, black schematic.
It was the middle door that grabbed hold of her. The glass was thick with a gray, icy mist. It had been like that for better than 15 years – she remembered watching on a similar monitor the last time that door was closed, and the occupant sealed frozen within. She remembered the decision to preserve the Fyal specimen was filled with controversy.
There had been so much debate among the nine of them who had survived and whose minds were still lucid. It was that very debate that forced their hand on another issue – the field appointment of a new captain. Not everyone realized at first that Lara was third in line.
She broke a tie vote, favoring the use of the stasis system for the Fyal. It was her most difficult command decision.
&n
bsp; Lara wondered how the long-term strain of a Fyal presence affected the crew. Each of them had been awake for at least three eight-month rotations on the return voyage, each with ample opportunity to vent their rage by discharging the specimen into space.
For Lara, this final rotation had been overwhelmed by the love she felt for Daniel; the combination of emotional attachment and the reality that the mission was ending provided ample sustenance. But her earlier rotations were not as easy. Although the Fyal was never mentioned – the specimen chamber was blatantly ignored, in fact – the tension was always close by.
“Lara?”
She snapped out of her trance. “Oh, I'm sorry, Daniel. Yes?”
“I'm off to the agripod. Fran's going to watch on the monitor.” He glanced toward Earth. “Let me know if anything changes.”
“You be careful.”
Daniel smiled with nonchalance. “It's still dead.”
Her eyes followed him into the SlipTube, and she began counting hours until they could be alone.
She pointed to the live monitor over Fran's workstation. “I'll be more than happy when we can say farewell to that thing.”
“Won't argue with you on that,” Fran replied. “But I am glad we got the specimen with us. You can't put a price on how valuable that cargo is going to be – to everyone. We don't know much about the Fyal's anatomy, and that knowledge is going to be valuable some day. I just hope ASTROcom does right by us. Every biosym research facility in the world is going to want the rights to that thing. The facility that gets hold of our ice queen will put together a marketing strategy that'll turn billions.”
Lara nodded, but it was a weak understanding. She returned to a comfortable swivel facing the forward viewport and again pondered the mystery straight ahead.
Fran's monologue made Lara realize that she had not really thought about what she would actually do after her life was settled again – assuming the Fyal did not represent an immediate danger. The only real vision she ever had – and it was repetitious – featured her and Daniel eating a quiet but romantic breakfast on the veranda of their early 21st-century Oregon bungalow. There was sunshine, breeze and trees – lots of trees. And then, a daughter.
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