An M1 Abrams tank was making its way towards us, somewhat tentatively, as we approached the Ulysses Grant memorial and its pool, in front of the Capitol. It stopped, turret swivelling, and took aim. I ignored it, kept our insurrectionist quartet steadily moving. “Takanlian technology was incredibly advanced – they had conquered ageing and disease, used super-fast learning methods, could travel at nearly light speed and lived in a cashless, peaceful utopia – but their emotional systems had been suppressed in the past. This made them a more cohesive society, less likely to rebel or negatively influence the lives of others, but they recognized that they were losing out. I was there to help fill in some of the blanks, to offer a genome within which advanced biochemistry and the full range of emotional responses could be combined.”
The tank fired with what must have been an enormous, gunfire bark, but its armour-piercing shell was absorbed noiselessly by the shield. Liz spent a few moments checking with her studio that the feed was getting through. More wire services and cable news channels were carrying this than had ever carried anything – the 2024 Olympics, O.J. Simpson, Clinton’s blowjob, the Cheney war crimes sentencing, anything – and so I had the perfect platform from which to explain both what was going on, and what was coming.
“How did you travel there and back?” Liz asked, struggling for a single, meaningful question among the mass of unknowns I had just created.
“Well, some highly advanced engine technology was involved, and I was asleep for almost all of the two journeys. I had to travel through time, on the way home, in order to arrive in time to avert the Pandora’s Box of tragedies mankind was about to heap upon itself.”
We were only minutes from the Mall. Above us, I knew, the Phoenix would be entering a transfer orbit and then decelerating to begin its plunge into the atmosphere. “But how could you know about that? How can anyone know the future?” Liz managed.
“By the time I reached Takanli, 40 years had passed. All I needed to do was read up on the latest subspace news – none of it was good. There were terrible wars, some of them nuclear, as well as plagues, famines, insurgencies… It was a living hell for the survivors. Humanity did its best to wipe itself out. I couldn’t let that happen, no matter how stupid or selfish we became. No species deserves to watch its own extinction on the news.”
Evelyn had a question; “So what we’re doing today is going to prevent that?”
I brought our quartet to a stop just as we crossed onto the grass of the Mall, right by the American Indian museum. “Well, I’ve been working to prevent it for years. The Dvalin project, as you know, is intended to solve the resource problems which seem to be the root of most human conflict. With equitable, even cashless access to resources, we can build the infrastructure, education systems and healthcare everyone needs – not just those lucky enough to live in resource-rich areas.
“What we’re doing today”, I continued, “was never actually part of the Dvalin plan. Right now I’m supposed to be relaxing in my hotel after the hearings. Instead, I’m having to step in to save the project from nuclear annihilation.”
Liz had received copy on her phone and turned away from the interview to deliver it to Joe’s camera, while I finalized plans with Hal. Beasley had taken a knee, breathing steadily once more, while Evelyn stared agape at the formation of tanks which were volley-firing sabot rounds at the shield. They were nothing more than toys against this technology, she saw. A mighty army, humbled by a little blue ball.
“Tom, I’m standing at the centre of a blue field of energy which is protecting the four of us from a large-scale assault by the US army. Thousands of rounds have been fired at us, to no effect. There are now attack helicopters in the skies over DC and two formations of armour have converged on our position. Perhaps two hundred soldiers are surrounding us, all under orders to apprehend the leader of the Dvalin project.” She glanced around. “Most of them seemed to have stopped firing, probably because it is pointless.
“I’m here with Senator Chris Beasley who is a long-time friend and political ally of the project, and Captain Evelyn Tanner, an Air Force liaison officer and lawyer… I haven’t been told why we’ve stopped here on the Mall but I understand from our sources that the United States has attacked the Dvalin asteroid in an attempt to remove it as a perceived threat.”
Outside the shield, the firing had pretty much stopped. A motorcade was approaching on Madison Drive – the president’s limo and a lot of security, I saw – and I checked the final timings with Hal. We had four minutes until our transport arrived and only twenty until nuclear warheads would begin smashing Dvalin.
Liz turned back to me. “Can you explain the administration’s position on your project? How has it changed so abruptly?”
It was safe to say all of this now – clearly the President’s tenure would shortly be over – and so I laid out their paranoia as Evelyn had explained it. “Change is difficult and painful, and some people prefer to lash out in the hopes of averting it, rather than embracing the good things it offers.” Two minutes, I heard from Hal in my earpiece. “Right now, hundreds of modified ICBMs are racing towards Dvalin. They will be stopped, as I’m about to explain to the President. If he gets here fast enough.” The motorcade had to thread its way through ranks of armour and other army vehicles, but was finally approaching the edge of the shield. As it did so, the guns finally fell silent. We stood line abreast, Beasley and Evelyn on my left, the slightly wobbly Liz on my right.
The President got out, flanked by dozens of Secret Service people, and glanced around at the chaos of men, trucks, tanks and police vehicles. It was relatively quiet. I called out, “Mr President… I would like to invite you to step inside the shield, although I doubt your security people would permit it”. He glanced around to see three dozen heads all shaking, absolutely no way. “In which case, Mr President, I’d like to offer you this opportunity to apologize.”
Evelyn, Beasley and Liz all took turns gawking at me in amazement. Outside the shield, and only through numerous feats of personal courage, Joe was right there, steadying his camera, jostled by security people and soldiers, continuing the live feed which now had an audience whose size was impossible to guess.
“Why don’t you come out from under there and we can talk properly?”
I fixed my gaze on the president, a slender man with thinning hair, standing there with arms by his sides. “Because we’ll all be blown to smithereens, why do you think?” offered Evelyn, suddenly almost unimaginably confident when addressing her Commander in Chief. “Mr President you need to call off the army and defuse this situation. I don’t think you know, any more, what you’re dealing with”.
He wagged a finger at us. “Oh, of course I know, Captain Tanner. How could you think I’d be that ignorant? I’ve been signing away billions a year to this lunatic, and now he’s poised a giant rock above the earth, ready to hold us all to ransom. I’m duty bound to stop him!” To reiterate the point, three F-54 fighter-bombers buzzed the Mall, merely a hundred feet over the shield’s hemispherical crest. “These alien beings he’s friends with… well, he claims a lot of things. My predecessors might have bought into it, but I know bullshit when I see it, and this is the greatest crock in history. The American people are smart enough to see that. And to see through him for what he really is – a charlatan, a megalomaniac, and a compulsive liar.” Joe had found a great position. We were as live as anyone had ever been.
“Wow”, chuckled the Senator. “Guess he learned some ten-point words from somewhere”. Evelyn giggled despite the gravity of the situation. There was a sense not only of impermeability, but of authority to the protected space within the blue shield; we were the masters of the Capitol. The gulf between earth’s present, and her near future, was never more clearly displayed.
“Mr President”, I said, speaking calmly and deliberately. “Your actions are no longer rational. I have given you no reason to fear Dvalin, but your military leaders have infected you with their paranoid insanity. N
othing that has happened today will change the project.”
He stiffened, pulling himself up to his full height. “You could not be more wrong. General – time to impact?”
“Twelve minutes, Mr President”, came the snapped reply.
I smiled thinly. I only had ninety seconds left. “HR 7716” I said simply.
The President shot me a look. “What’s that?”
I motioned to Chris, standing by my side. “HR 7716 is Senator Beasley’s impeachment bill. It will demonstrate that a form of coup d’état has taken place, that the current administration can no longer be trusted to act in the best interests of the nation, and that rather than permit your vice-president to assume power, a general election will be called.” Beasley stared down the President, bringing to bear forty years of hard-won gravitas. “It also calls for the resignation and arrest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is expected to be carried unanimously”.
The President wasn’t flinching. “And how, pray, do you expect me to believe that?”
Timing was everything, and we got it just right. “Because”, I began, “whereas you’re backed up by the US armed forces and hundreds of nuclear weapons…” I paused for a second, glanced up, grinned despite myself, and concluded, “I’m backed up by one of these”.
From behind the Washington Monument a silver speck appeared in the sky, racing supersonically down the Mall. It slowed, dark orange flames jetting from its underside, and came into a hover thirty feet above us. Sleek, silver, extraordinarily beautiful, the Phoenix had arrived.
A swarm of missiles fizzed across the sky from numerous angles – fighter planes, helicopters, shoulder-mounted rockets – and headed for the Cruiser. At a stroke, and simultaneously, the white rocket trails ceased, the motors died and the missiles all fell straight down, forward momentum entirely cancelled. They landed in a chorus of thuds, on the roadways and the grass of the Mall, inert and emasculated. No-one tried a second time.
“Mr President, I think I’ll be leaving now. My guests”, I motioned to the others, “are invited to remain with me, chiefly for their own safety, until matters here are resolved.” I turned towards the ship, the enjoyment of her perfect lines eclipsing even the intense pressure of the moment. “Oh… but before I go….” My tone was almost conversational now, as if relating an almost-forgotten anecdote. “As you can see, I have the power to influence weapons of all kinds. Hundreds of your missiles are headed towards Dvalin. Pray that I don’t decide to turn them loose on their masters”.
Just for the cameras and, I guess, for history’s sake, I decided that we should board the Phoenix without Relocating. The Cruiser touched down quietly on the grass – the orange flames had been an entirely unnecessary, but pleasingly dramatic touch – and our blue shield met the ship, rippled over its silver surface and remained in place until we had walked up the gangway into the ship’s interior.
Hal was just hopping with urgency, so I let him take command while I quickly got the others seated. Phoenix turned in a neat, swivelling 180, hovered briefly over the presidential motorcade, whose security people had never felt more impotent, and rocketed down the Mall. The crowd of soldiers, war machines and onlookers receded behind us as we gained altitude, quickly leaving central DC behind and streaking skyward like a dart through the autumn air.
Chapter XLIV: Dvalin
Finally, Hal had something really interesting to do. He hummed merrily to himself while computing the ascent angles of the missiles, while my passengers took in the startling view provided by our almost rudely energetic ascent. Beasley looked a bit shaken but Evelyn was in her element. “I don’t know if we’ll be spinning to create any gravity”, this was Hal’s show after all, “so get ready to feel like you’ve reached the peak of a rollercoaster which goes on forever”.
Phoenix was back in space within three minutes of taking our leave of the President. High above, and across the Atlantic, Dvalin hung in its orbit, a giant target for the incoming warheads. “How are we doing, Hal?”
The supercomputer was, as ever, in complete control. “Capture has commenced”. Hal had precise trajectory characteristics for each warhead, some obtained by robotic observers on Dvalin and others from orbital outposts assembled more recently. He could simply extend Phoenix’s Relocation beam to bring them under his control. As each group approached, their courses suddenly changed – one could only imagine the terrified panic at Cheyenne Mountain and in the Pentagon – and they slid neatly into a circle around our newest moon.
Liz kept up a steady commentary, feeding through information displayed on our data screens, answering questions from the news anchor in DC and sporadically interviewing Beasley and Evelyn. “I wish I knew more as to what will happen to the nuclear weapons, but right now”, she checked the screens once more, “they appear to be spontaneously changing course, grouping together and orbiting Dvalin”.
Hal brought us into the same orbit, alongside a group of warheads, their gleaming steel reflecting the bright sun which illuminated Dvalin. I turned to Liz, whose words were augmented by on-board cameras Hal was feeding to the news networks. Dvalin’s cameras would add further imagery – Hal was quite the producer, it seemed – and in all, the world would have a grandstand seat for this seminal event.
“You know, I’m sure, the expression ‘turning swords into ploughshares?’ Liz nodded, smiling. “Well, we’ve taken some big steps today and revealed a lot about mankind’s status in the universe. We’ve revealed that we are not alone. This is going to take some getting used to”.
From the surface of Dvalin a rectangular, box-shaped object rose up and entered orbit with us. It was a burnished silver colour, perhaps the size of a shipping container. “To help in this realization, and to explain something of the background, I’m going to provide the people of Earth with a summary of what I encountered on Takanli, as well as a limited amount of information about our galactic neighbourhood. It is time for us to think less provincially, more holistically, about who we are, where we are located, and what it means to be a representative of consciousness.”
The metal box, which I knew to be one of my larger Replicator devices, accepted a warhead into its gaping front-end and, seconds later, a cluster of small, torpedo-shaped objects came out of the back. Each nuclear payload was instantly broken down into the most basic forms of matter, and then recombined as per Hal’s recipe, producing thousands of small re-entry devices.
“These are information packages. When assembled, they will display a one-hour documentary film on a large screen, similar to those erected in city squares for big sporting events. Once the film is finished, a virtual guide will emerge, take human form, and answer any question posed to it.” Video and audio feeds of my speech continued to enthral the world, interspersed with footage from outside, where the Replicator was finishing its job of eating up the warheads. Cameras now followed the cloud of re-entry vessels, each about the size of a large shark, as they broke away from our steady circuit of Dvalin.
A small, powerful engine at the rear of each module ignited, beginning their descent into the atmosphere. “Most of the world’s major cities will be receiving an information package in the next few minutes. There is nothing to fear from these objects. Once they arrive, in a large park or city square, they will gently land and deploy their screens. We’ll be broadcasting the same message through the news media, so that the maximum number of humans witness it in the shortest period of time.”
The modules were disappearing now, hurled downward, absorbing and radiating away the heat of entry. The groups split up, thrusters firing in short bursts, radiating out towards the world’s cities. There were, lamentably but predictably, moments of paranoia. Several ABM missiles tried to intercept the packages – Hal saw that they did not succeed – and several dozen nations had their air forces on alert. One particularly vociferous USAF unit, still under the command of the Joint Chiefs, volley-fired air-to-air missiles, to absolutely no effect, and had to watch while the package they had targeted
decelerated neatly, landed without fanfare in Ashworth Park, Des Moines, and waited for the local authorities to approach.
There was just the most extraordinary amount to say, at this crucial point, but I felt I would let the Takanlians speak for themselves. My role as interlocutor, interpreter, go-between (call it what you will) was soon to end. There would be a shockwave now, the likes of which no society has ever been asked to endure; the most abrupt and extreme bolt from the blue a people can experience. We are not alone.
Doesn’t it feel reassuring, I thought quietly to myself at the helm of the Phoenix, to know that for a certainly? We’ve speculated for millennia, and now we actually know, for the first time, in the same way we know the Earth revolves around the Sun. We know there are inhabited planets – enough, certainly, to form vast alliances and groupings – and we know, also, that the technologies needed to reach them, however farfetched and ungraspable to many, actually exist. We can travel at the speed of light, and faster. We can even travel through time. Although it is sodding difficult, I mused to myself, glancing out of the window once more as Hal brought us closer to Dvalin. “Docking will commence shortly”. The Supercomputer’s tone was as confident as ever. I marvelled at him, so sure-footed amid such unbridled human chaos.
Phoenix approached the dull-brown rock of Dvalin until the asteroid filled the front windows. She was lumpy and cratered, as if assembled from play-dough by an experimenting two year-old and then pelted with cosmic hard candy. The ejecta rays of its hundred craters were bright in the sunshine, while its rocky surface seemed scarred, battle-weary, tired after a billion years in the vacuum wilderness. Now, I thought to myself, the great rock has a home. And a family, a new purpose. The possibilities… neigh, the inevitabilities thrilled my spine with a pleasing electric tingle.
“Senator… Liz… Captain Tanner…” I motioned to each of my guests, stringing out slightly this unique moment of welcome, of sharing. “I’m delighted to be able to usher you aboard the Earth’s new moon, Dvalin. There is a lot we need to talk about, and we won’t be alone in our discussions.” Right now, I knew, Hal was on the phone. Our guests would be arriving in about an hour, which gave us time to get settled into our new quarters. “Gravity is established, so you’ll feel its effects pretty immediately.” In truth, we already did; objects ceased their float around the cabin and made a steady descent to the floor (which could now, truthfully, be called such) while the passengers were glued in an initially disconcerting way into their seats. “Follow me when you’re ready”.
Voyage Page 51
