by David Gunner
Canthouse’s countenance defaulted to confusion, and he glanced at an equally perplexed Denz who met his gaze as Stavener paced between the table and the display.
“Is there something you’re not telling us Mr Stavener?” asked Denz, his voice relaxed and coaxing. “Or, perhaps, something you can’t tell us?”
Stavener continued to pace for several seconds before turning to Denz, his face a deep worried red. “Sir, with all due respect, I’ve already said far too much. I …” Stavener realised the gravity of his error and froze as he believed himself to have crossed some concealed line of confidence or treason. He stood stock still, scared to utter a single word.
The commander again glanced at his first officer, who returned the significance the look carried. Denz stood, and in a slow careful step he approached the scarecrow of a man by an indirect path.
“Mr Stavener,” Denz said in a low conspiratorial tone, his gaze one of veiled subversion, “I believe, you believe, you have said too much about a guarded subject. A subject that should, perhaps, not be mentioned beyond certain borders or within the reach of certain ears. If your orders for secrecy come from some higher directive to protect the inner security of the EDP, then I commend you on your fidelity, and on my word this slip will be forgotten. However …” Denz paused in his slow pacing so as to park himself in profile next to Stavener, who remained still expect for the watery red rimmed eyes that followed Denz. “If you’re concerned that certain … benevolent patrons will discover what has been said here then I can assure you they won’t.” Denz raised his cautious seditious gaze to meet Stavener’s fearful look. “What you say here will never leave this room. You are amongst compatriots here.”
And with those words it was done.
Denz realised he had opened a door to an underworld he could not be sure existed, and wasn’t even sure why he had done so. He took it as granted that all RN officers were of the anti-Koll school,that some clandestine faction did indeed exist, and that they would all naturally work together with little more than a significant look to assure loyalty. It just seemed to be the natural order of things. If Stavener was from the other camp then he would say nothing or simply walk out of the room, and he himself would never leave the next station they visited. The Koll would return for him and he would simply disappear.
Then a mortifying thought struck him. What if Stavener was not the only concern here? Canthouse! For some reason he had presumed that his first officer was with him, no matter what he said here. But what if he was wrong? He had shared a look of significance with Canthouse. Traded what he believed to be confidences with a man he trusted, but who had so recently failed in his duty. What if Canthouse turned out to be more than a mostly competent officer and was just waiting for Stavener to sufficiently betray himself and then report them both?
He glanced at his first officer who remained stoical, his gaze on Stavener.
Could he be assuming too much? Could Canthouse be trusted? Maybe he was over thinking this. Yet what was done was done. There was no way he could recover from what he had opened himself up to, so he just had to push forward to see where it went.
God, how he wished Canthouse would say something, if for nothing more than to relieve the conspiratorial burden.
Stavener remained silent and unmoving, his eyes flicking between Denz and Canthouse and he seemed unlikely to ever move again unless toppled to the floor.
Denz perched himself on the lip of the table next to Canthouse, his face neutral and his hands clasped by his stomach in as natural an ‘at ease’ posture he could manage. “So let me ask you, Mr Stavener. Can you continue to explain the significance of this Unity device, or are we to leave this room with the issue forgotten?”
The operations officer stared at the two officers as it evaluating risk potential.
“You are amongst friends, Stavener,” Canthouse said with an encouraging smile.
Dens felt like a Christian unburdened at those words.
Canthouse continued, “This is an unofficial meeting. Nothings being recorded. You can say anything you want without fear or reprisal.”
The operations officer bore the look and posture of someone who was having the truth levered from them with a gun. “It’s for spying on The Koll,” he said. Only to immediately look like he wished he hadn’t. But when the imagined pistol failed to materialise he appeared to relax a little.
“If there’s a matter of urgency in recovering this device, then perhaps you could explain a little more?” Denz said.
Before Stavener could respond, a low meeping sound could be heard coming from somewhere behind Canthouse. The noise increased in intensity as the first officer looked about him and retrieved the beeping tablet from behind Denz. Canthouse glanced at it, swiped the screen and pushed several of the buttons only for the meeping to continue. He then spun it over, ripped off the rear cover and tore out the battery.
The first officer dropped the pieces to the floor saying, “Oops! Clumsy me.”
Denz understood this to be an offering of trust to Stavener. That Canthouse was reducing the ability for anyone to spy on them by inhibiting the device, but he still wished he hadn’t had to destroy a £3000 tablet to do it.
Yet it worked. Stavener appeared to understand the action as had Denz and relaxed past the threshold of mistrust into a low intimacy.
“The device,” The operations officer said followed by a significant pause, as if gathering courage. “The device, the unity device is a transceiver.” He said hesitantly.
“We figured that. Anything else?” Denz said.
Stavener let out a slow considering breath and then opened up. “The unity box was constructed by Secure Internal Resourcing before The Koll annex as a possible weapon to be used on The Koll forces as they closed on Earth. Where the plans came from, I’ve no idea. They just appeared. But SIR built it and it worked; to a degree.”
“How so?” asked Canthouse. “You mentioned quantum entanglement. Was this part of the problem?”
“Well …” Stavener began to pace, his hands animating his thoughts. “I’m assuming you know what quantum entanglement is. It’s the linking of two electrons over galactic distances. But not any two electrons. These are bound electrons. Electrons that are slaved so the action of one is reflected in the other, instantly, no matter the distance. As I mentioned, the SIR initially wanted to develop it as a weapon, but as the electrons have virtually no mass and we couldn’t bleed enough energy to make it viable, they fell back on communications, which was just feasible. They spun one electron one way the other gave a reverse action. We reversed ours and the opposite did the same. By manipulating the spin we could send a form of Morse code that reached any target at any distance, with between a hundredth and a tenth of a second delay depending on what encryption used. You’ll understand what a boon this is when you consider that our current communications systems can take days, even weeks to reach their destinations. Sometimes with the ship that sent them arriving before the message did. There was no voice, no images initially. Just dots and dashes, but it was enough …as long as the receiving station had the paired unity device.”
“I’m guessing this was the problem,” Denz said.
“Actually, not really, as we had the mirrored units and they developed a plan to deploy them.”
“Then I’m guessing they were easy to track or used incredible amounts of power?” asked Canthouse.
“Again no on both points,” Stavener said. His voice was calm and his posture relaxed as if he was leading a class on a well versed subject. “They were impossible to track as the communication path was completely random with every data bit sent. Not different with every message, you understand. But with every – data - unit. One packet could have been travelling to the far side of the universe and back. Another may have taken a laser straight line, but they always arrived in order and on time with no corruption. And the thing never used any power. At all! Well certainly no power supplied by SIR. They guessed it tapped into fabr
ic energy but had no idea how.”
“And no power, no signature,” Canthouse’s skewed smile reflected his understanding.
Stavener nodded in accord.
“So the problem?” Denz asked.
Stavener sat down heavily and rubbed his furrowed brow, “The problem they identified was that if you took a single unit and pointed it randomly into interstellar space, you picked up voices.”
“Voices?” Canthouse said incredulously, “What kind of voices?”
“Just that: voices! Weird, staticky communications that made no sense. They sounded like a radio just short of a station, with lots of white noise, words fading in and out,” Stavener made a coming and going gesture with his fingers. “The SIR couldn’t make heads or tails of it, presuming they were receiving corrupted broadcasts from the ships and stations of the EDP fleet. Except for one thing …” The operations officer bore a look of infinite cunning.
“Which was?” The first officer asked leaning forward in keen interest.
“None of the received broadcasts were in any EDP language, code or encryption.” Stavener suppressed a laugh as he considered some irrelevance.
“So what were they?” Canthouse snapped with the rising impatience of someone deliberately kept from the identity of the masked murderer.
“In the twentieth century the then Soviet Union dug a bore hole on the Kola peninsula. When they finished it was over twelve kilometres deep. So deep that some people purportedly made recordings of crying and wailing from the bottom of the hole. They believed the drill had broken through to hell, and the sounds were the tormented voices of the damned. There were those amongst the WIA that considered the opposite, that the device had tapped into some celestial paradise; possibly Heaven. This was nonsense of course, and they finally realised the device was picking up communications from alien civilisations. Real time communications from civilisations we had no idea existed.” Stavener paused for this to have effect.
“My, God!” Canthouse wore the enthralled face of a young boy listening to campfire ghost stories.
Denz leaned back crossing his arms about his chest, not fully understanding the significance of this as a problem. “So how is this a problem? Surely it’s a benefit.”
Stavener hunched his shoulders in a matter of fact way. “Well, part of the problem was no matter where they pointed the transceiver they received previously undetected alien broadcasts. This was interesting at first, but they soon mapped hundreds then thousands of different races. We broke the encryption on some, with others in plain, if unknown languages. But none of them were The Koll. At least not that they could ascertain.”
“It must have been an avalanche of information,” Canthouse said.
“It was. Here they had this ultimate eves-dropping device but no idea where to point it. They kept pointing it randomly, hoping to receive some sort of signal or intelligence from the Koll, but it was all in vain with no identifiable successes. At least until the LN-0R incursion. Then they had them.”
Denz uncrossed his arms; his interest peaked at the mention of LN-0R. “So the EDP had intelligence before the invasion and they did nothing!” A liquid fire stirred within him at this possibility.
Stavener shifted in his seat. Denz’s veil was reddening with the anger almost tangible and he just hoped it wasn’t directed at him personally. “The EDP was aware of an incident in Chinese space but had no idea as to what was happening as The Koll had jammed most of the signals. Commander, you’re aware of how quickly the incident escalated. When EDP central realised that it was The Koll, they immediately issued orders to form up the fleet, but by then it was too late. The colony was gone.”
Denz was near smouldering, his face a livid red as he stared at the communications officer. Even the normally unflappable Canthouse showed his discomfort with what he heard, leaning back his arms crossed and countenance deadpan. Stavener realised he needed to reengage their interest so there anger was directed elsewhere,
“But the disaster at LN0R wasn’t the only problem the EDP faced.”
Neither officer spoke.
“Even though they now knew where The Koll where, it took the combined might of every quantum mainframe on the planet to break the codes, and it still took a week. By then The Koll forces were already on the move toward Earth, so the EDP responded the only way they could, they deployed the fleet.” Stavener glanced at Denz who was still livid, though it appeared to have dropped to a simmering murder.
The communications officer licked his lips and swallowed hard, he squirmed, his mouth opening as if to cite something difficult only for him to sit back and stare at the floor.
“Then what?” asked Denz in a cooler tone.
Stavener glanced at him; an unwilling aspect in his unblinking gaze. “The fleet was deployed and formed up to meet The Koll forces. After evaluating some of the Chinese signals that did make it through, the EDP was actually quite confident in the outcome, until …” Stavener’s mouth contorted with an unwillingness to go on.
“Until what?” Denz snapped, his face reddening again.”
The operation’s officer bore the disconsolate expression of a policeman informing a family of the loss of a loved one. “As our forces massed the World Intelligence Agency broke a Koll code that contained information of their preparing a contingency plan. It appears that they too had concerns of the outcome and had developed a counter initiative should things not go their way.”
“Which was?” asked Canthouse.
Stavener paused, looking between the men, his face grave with what followed said in cold soberness. “They had a weapon. An enormous multi-nature device that would have been nothing short of disastrous to the planet. The details of how it functioned are not relevant. It’s enough to understand that it was a kill all. The Earth would have been reduced to a proto-planet in days. Humans all gone.”
“My God.” Canthouse said quietly, his face ashen and white knuckled hands gripping the desk lip to steady himself.
Denz simply stared, his initial burning anger dampened by an inner realisation. After a moments apparent reflection he said, “But I was there and saw no such weapon. All they had were ships, no large missiles.”
“It wasn’t with their fleet. They couldn’t risk it being destroyed as it was as lethal to them as us, so they left it at LN0R to be called on if needed. It would have taken a little time to arrive, but by then their fleet would be gone so what difference would a few more days make in destroying Earth.” Stavener’s face suddenly became pale, his lips thin lines and eyes dark circles as he looked away from the two men. “The WIA informed the world council and they did the only thing possible to save the human race. They issued our willingness to surrender unconditionally. This is the reason for the capitulation.”
The first officer looked to be in a state of shock as he glanced at Denz. “We came so close.”
Denz slouched against the table with his gaze on the floor; a pale tongue peaking between his dry lips as he considered how close Earth had come to being a lifeless molten sphere. “How close?”
Stavener had regained a little of his colour. “WIA reasons that if pressed, The Koll would have ultimately won the engagement, but it would have cost them dear. They may have taken Earth, but they would have lost their fleet capabilities leaving them open to retaliatory strikes from previously conquered races.”
“A Pyrrhic victory,” Denz said.
“Yes. The WIA estimated The Koll were willing to lose forty percent of their forces. More than that and they would have withdrew and launched. They knew this action would have been nothing like their engagement with the Chinese, who had the might but were still forming up. The Koll forces would be arriving with no preceding screen of rocks and asteroids to bombard our forces. They would be engaging a driven enemy fighting on home soil to protect their home world. We had to support of several planets and dozens of heavily armed stations and platforms to lend their weight. Not to mention the thousands of civilian ships we could use to
simply ram the Koll if needed. The projection said that if The Koll lost ships at the rate they did at LN0R, we would have been looking at the launch of their final solution in a little over eight hours from the first shot being fired.”
Realisation dawned on Denz and he looked lost, his eyes flitting as multiple scenarios and ultimate dead end conclusions ran through his mind. He pushed himself from the table, his face pale, eyes fixed and staring with a finger crooked under his nose as he paced in deep deliberation. At the time he had cursed the world council for their surrender. He had been champing at the bit to pull the trigger and engage the enemy. Not a single shot had been fired as the two fleets closed on each other, but what if it had? What would the Earth been now if he had succumb to the battle rage and cried that one single word? He could so easily have been the end of everything.
“We couldn’t have won.”Denz’s hand trembled as he paced the briefing area. Scenario after scenario formed in his mind with each struck down when he considered this new information. “We couldn’t have won, Malcolm. We might have won the battle but we could never have been victorious.” Tears glistened in the corners of his eyes as he turned to face his first officer. “I was wrong in my conclusion. We had no solution. My actions were those of a conceited fool. They died for nothing!”
Denz suddenly looked old and frail, his eyes glassy and confused as if dementia had stepped from the shadows and spread its cloak to embrace him. Canthouse could only feel for his commanding officer. The devastating realisation that his impulsive decision to flee Earth’s surrendering forces had been for nothing, and his crew had suffered and died needlessly would surely destroy him If he were allowed to dwell on it. It may even trigger another psychotic episode.
“Died for nothing,” Denz repeated with the knuckle of the crooked finger slipping between his lips as he stared at the floor in myopic abstraction.
“The transmitters, these unity devices,” Canthouse said in his bridge voice as he regained himself. “You mentioned there was more of a problem.”
