by John Scalzi
“All right,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“Roanoke is in serious trouble,” Szilard said. “We all are. The Colonial Union had anticipated that destroying the Conclave fleet would throw the Conclave into a civil war. That much was correct. Right now the Conclave is tearing itself apart. The races loyal to General Gau are squaring off against another faction who has found a leader in a member of the Arris race named Nerbros Eser. As it stands there’s only one thing that has kept these two factions of the Conclave from destroying each other entirely.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“The thing the Colonial Union didn’t anticipate,” Szilard said. “And that is that every single member race of the Conclave is now bent on destroying the Colonial Union. Not just containing the Colonial Union, as General Gau was content to do. They want to eradicate it completely.”
“Because we wiped out the fleet,” I said.
“That’s the proximate cause,” Szilard said. “The Colonial Union forgot that in attacking the fleet we weren’t only striking at the Conclave but at every member of the Conclave. The ships in the fleet were often the flagships for their races. We didn’t just destroy a fleet, we destroyed racial symbols. We kicked every single member race of the Conclave hard and square in the balls, Perry. They’re not going to forgive that. But beyond that we’re trying to use the destruction of the Conclave fleet as a rallying point for other unaffiliated races. We’re trying to get them to become our allies. And the Conclave members have decided that the best way to keep those races unaffiliated is to make an example out of the Colonial Union. All of it.”
“You don’t sound surprised,” I said.
“I’m not,” Szilard said. “When destroying the Conclave fleet was first considered, I had the Special Forces intelligence corps model out the consequences of that act. This was always the most likely result.”
“Why didn’t they listen?” I asked.
“Because the CDF models told the Colonial Union what it wanted to hear,” Szilard said. “And because at the end of the day the Colonial Union is going to place more weight on the intelligence generated by real humans than the intelligence created by the Frankenstein monsters it creates to do its dirty work.”
“Like destroy the Conclave fleet,” I said, recalling Lieutenant Stross.
“Yes,” Szilard said.
“If you believed this was going to be the result, you should have refused to do it,” I said. “You shouldn’t have let your soldiers destroy the fleet.”
Szilard shook his head. “It’s not that simple. If I were to have refused, I would have been replaced as the commander of Special Forces. Special Forces are no less ambitious and venal than any other sort of human being, Perry. I can think of three generals under me who would have been happy to take my job for the simple cost of following foolish orders.”
“But you followed foolish orders,” I said.
“I did,” Szilard said. “But I did so under my own terms. Part of which was helping to install you and Sagan as colony leaders at Roanoke.”
“You installed me,” I said. This was news to me.
“Well, actually, I installed Sagan,” Szilard said. “You were merely part of the package deal. It was acceptable because you seemed unlikely to fuck things up.”
“Nice to be valued,” I said.
“You did make it easier to suggest Sagan,” Szilard said. “I knew you had a history with General Rybicki. In all, you came in handy. But in point of fact neither you nor Sagan was the key to the equation. It was your daughter, Administrator Perry, who really matters here. Your daughter was the reason I chose the two of you to lead Roanoke.”
I tried to puzzle this one out. “Because of the Obin?” I asked.
“Because of the Obin,” Szilard agreed. “Because of the fact the Obin consider her something only a little short of a living god, thanks to their devotion to her true father, and the debatably beneficial boon of consciousness that he gave them.”
“I’m afraid that I don’t understand how the Obin matter here,” I said, although that was a lie. I knew precisely, but I wanted to hear it from Szilard.
He obliged. “Because Roanoke is doomed without them,” he said. “Roanoke has served its primary purpose of being a trap for the Conclave fleet. Now the entire Colonial Union is under attack and the CU will have to decide how best to portion out its defensive resources.”
“We’re already aware Roanoke doesn’t rate much of a defense,” I said. “I and my staff have had our face rubbed in that fact today.”
“Oh, no,” Szilard said. “It’s worse than that.”
“How can it be worse?” I asked.
“This way: Roanoke is more valuable to the Colonial Union dead than alive,” Szilard said. “You have to understand, Perry. The Colonial Union is about to fight for its life against most of the races we know of. Its nice little system of farming decrepit Earthlings for soldiers isn’t going to get the job done anymore. It’s going to need to raise troops from the worlds of the Colonial Union, and fast. This is where Roanoke comes in. Alive, Roanoke is just another colony. Dead, it’s a symbol for the ten worlds who gave it colonists, and to all the rest of the worlds in the Colonial Union. When Roanoke dies, the citizens of the Colonial Union are going to demand that they be allowed to fight. And the Colonial Union will let them.”
“You know this for sure,” I said. “This has been discussed.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” Szilard said. “It never will be. But it’s what will happen. The Colonial Union knows that Roanoke is a symbol for the Conclave races as well, the site of their first defeat. It’s inevitable that defeat will be revenged. The Colonial Union also knows that by not defending Roanoke, that revenge will happen sooner than later. And sooner will work better for what the Colonial Union needs.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re saying that in order to fight the Conclave, the Colonial Union needs its citizens to become soldiers. And to motivate them into volunteering, Roanoke needs to be destroyed. But you’re telling me that the reason you chose Jane and I to lead Roanoke was because the Obin revere my daughter and would not allow the colony to be destroyed.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Szilard said. “The Obin would not allow your daughter to die, that much is true. They may or may not defend your colony. But the Obin offered you another advantage: knowledge.”
“You’ve lost me again,” I said.
“Stop playing the fool, Perry,” Szilard said. “It’s insulting. I know you know more about General Gau and the Conclave than you let on in that sham of an inquiry today. I know it because it was the Special Forces who prepared the dossier on General Gau and the Conclave for you, the one that rather sloppily left a tremendous amount of metadata in its files for you to find. I also know that your daughter’s Obin bodyguards knew rather more about the Conclave than we could tell you in our dossier. That’s how you knew you could trust General Gau at his word. And that’s why you tried to convince him not to call his fleet. You knew it would be destroyed and you knew he would be compromised.”
“You couldn’t have known I’d look for that metadata,” I said. “You were risking a lot on my curiosity.”
“Not really,” Szilard said. “Remember, you were largely incidental to the selection process. I left that information for Sagan to find. She was an intelligence officer for years. She would have looked for metadata in the files as a matter of course. The fact you found the information first is trivial. It would have been found. It does me no good to leave things to chance.”
“But none of that information does me any good now,” I said. “None of this changes the fact that Roanoke is in the crosshairs, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. You were at the inquiry. I’ll be lucky if they let me tell Jane what prison I’ll be rotting in.”
Szilard waved this off. “The inquiry determined that you acted responsibly and within your duties,” he said. “You’re free to return to Roanoke as soon
as you and I are done here.”
“I take it back,” I said. “You weren’t at the same inquiry I was at.”
“It is true that both Butcher and Berkeley are entirely convinced you’re absolutely incompetent,” Szilard said. “Both of them initially voted to move you to the Colonial Affairs Court, where you would have been convicted and sentenced in about five minutes. However, I managed to convince them to switch their vote.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Let’s just say that it never pays to have things you don’t want other people to know,” Szilard said.
“You’re blackmailing them,” I said.
“I made them aware that every action has a consequence,” Szilard said. “And in the fullness of their consideration they preferred the consequences of allowing you to return to Roanoke as opposed to the consequences of keeping you here. Ultimately it was all the same to them. They think you’re going to die if you go back to Roanoke.”
“I don’t know that I blame them,” I said.
“You could very well die,” Szilard said. “But as I said, you have certain advantages. One of them is your relationship to the Obin. Another is your wife. Between them you might manage to help Roanoke survive, and you with it.”
“But we’re back to the problem,” I said. “The way you tell it, the Colonial Union needs Roanoke to die. By helping me to save Roanoke, you’re working against the Colonial Union, General. You’re a traitor.”
“That’s my problem, not yours,” Szilard said. “I’m not worried about being branded a traitor. I’m worried about what happens if Roanoke falls.”
“If Roanoke falls, the Colonial Union gets its soldiers,” I said.
“And then it will go to war with most of the races in this part of space,” Szilard said. “And it will lose. And in losing, humanity will be wiped out. All of it, from Roanoke all the way up. Even Earth will die, Perry. It will be wiped out and the billions there will have no idea why they’re dying. Nothing will be saved. Humanity is on the brink of genocide. And it’s a genocide we will have inflicted on ourselves. Unless you can stop it. Unless you can save Roanoke.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said. “Just before I came here, Roanoke was attacked. Just five missiles, but it took everything we had to keep them from wiping us out. If a whole group of Conclave races wants to grind us into dirt I don’t know how we can stop them.”
“You need to find a way,” Szilard said.
“You’re a general,” I said. “You do it.”
“I am doing it,” Szilard said. “By giving the responsibility to you. I can’t do any more than that without losing my place in the Colonial Union hierarchy. And then I would be powerless. I’ve been doing what I can since this insane plan to attack the Conclave was formed. I used you as long as I could without letting you know, but we’re beyond that now. Now you know. It’s your job to save humanity, Perry.”
“No pressure there,” I said.
“You did it for years,” Szilard said. “Don’t you remember what they told you the job of Colonial Defense Forces was? ‘To keep a place for humanity among the stars.’ You did it then. You need to do it now.”
“Then it was me and every other member of the CDF,” I said. “The responsibility is a little more focused now.”
“Then let me help,” Szilard said. “Again, and for the last time. My intelligence corps has told me that General Gau is going to be assassinated by a member of his own circle of advisers. Someone he trusts; indeed, someone he loves. This assassination will happen within the month. We have no other information. We have no way of informing General Gau of the assassination attempt, and even if we had a way, there’s no way we could inform him, and no chance he would accept the information as genuine even if we could. If Gau dies, then all the Conclave will reform around Nerbros Eser, who plans to destroy the Colonial Union. If Nerbros Eser takes power, it’s all over. The Colonial Union will fall. Humanity dies.”
“What am I supposed to do with this information?” I asked.
“Find a way to use it,” Szilard said. “And find it fast. And then be ready for everything that happens afterward. And one other thing, Perry. Tell Sagan that while I don’t apologize for enhancing her abilities, I do regret the necessity. Let her also know that I suspect she has not yet explored the full range of her capabilities. Tell her that her BrainPal offers the complete range of command functions. Use those words, please.”
“What does ‘complete range of command functions’ mean here?” I asked.
“Sagan can explain it to you if she likes,” Szilard said. He reached over to the dash, pressed a button. Phoenix and Phoenix Station reappeared in the windows.
“Now,” Szilard said. “Time to get you back to Roanoke, Administrator Perry. You’ve been gone too long, and you have much to do. Time to get to it, I’d say.”
THIRTEEN
Save for Roanoke itself, the colony of Everest was the youngest human colony, settled just before the Conclave gave its warning to other races not to colonize any longer. Like Roanoke, Everest defenses were modest: a pair of defense satellites and six beam turrets, three each for the two settlements, and one CDF cruiser on rotation. When Everest was hit, it was the Des Moines stationed over the settlements. A good ship and a good crew, but the Des Moines was not enough to counter the six Arrisian ships that skipped with daring precision into Everest space, firing missiles at the Des Moines and the defense satellites as they arrived. The Des Moines sheared down its length and began the long fall toward the Everest surface; the defense satellites were rendered into so much floating junk.
The planet’s defenses collapsed, the Arrisian ships took their time searing the Everest settlements from orbit, finally dispatching a company to clean up the straggling colonists who remained. In the end 5,800 Everest colonists were dead. The Arrisians left behind no colonists or garrison and made no claim to the planet. They simply eradicated the human presence there.
Erie was no Everest—it was one of the oldest and most heavily populated of the human worlds, with a planetary defense grid and permanent CDF presence that would make it impossible for all but the most insanely ambitious races to make a play for. But even planetary defense grids can’t track every single chunk of ice or rock that falls into the gravity well. Several dozen such apparent chunks fell into Erie’s atmosphere, over the Erie city of New Cork. As they fell, the heat generated by the friction of the atmosphere was channeled and focused, powering the compact chemical lasers hidden within the rock.
Several of the beams struck strategic manufacturing concerns in New Cork, related to CDF weapons systems. Several more appeared to strike randomly, slashing through homes, schools and markets, killing hundreds. Their beams spent, the lasers burned up in the atmosphere, leaving no clue who had sent them or why.
This happened as Trujillo, Beata, Kranjic and I made our way back to Roanoke. We were unaware of it at the time, of course. We were unaware of the specific attacks that were going on around the Colonial Union, because the news was kept from us, and because we were focused on our own survival.
“You’ve offered us the protection of the Obin,” I said to Hickory within hours of my return to Roanoke. “We’d like to take advantage of that offer.”
“There are complications,” Hickory said.
I glanced over at Jane, and then back to Hickory. “Well, of course there are,” I said. “It wouldn’t be fun without complications.”
“I sense sarcasm,” Hickory said, with utterly no sense of humor whatsoever.
“I apologize, Hickory,” I said. “I’m having a bad week and it’s not getting any better. Please tell what these complications might be.”
“After you left, a skip drone arrived from Obinur, and we were finally able to communicate with our government. We have been told that once the Magellan disappeared, the Colonial Union formally requested that the Obin not interfere with the Roanoke colony, openly or covertly.”
“Roanoke
was specified,” Jane said.
“Yes,” said Hickory.
“Why?” I asked.
“The Colonial Union did not explain,” Hickory said. “We now assume it was because an Obin attempt to locate the planet could have disrupted the Colonial Union’s attack on the Conclave fleet. Our government agreed not to interfere but noted that should any harm come to Zoë, we would be greatly displeased. The Colonial Union assured our government that Zoë was reasonably safe. As she was.”
“The Colonial Union’s attack on the Conclave fleet is over,” I said.
“The agreement did not specify when it would be acceptable to interfere,” Hickory said, again with no trace of humor. “We are still bound to it.”
“So you can do nothing for us,” Jane said.
“We are charged with protecting Zoë,” Hickory said. “But we have been made to understand that the definition of protection extends only so far.”
“And if Zoë orders you to protect the colony?” I asked.
“Zoë may order Dickory and me as she wishes,” Hickory said. “But it is doubtful that even her intercession would be enough.”
I got up from my desk and stalked over to the window to look up at the night sky. “Do the Obin know the Colonial Union is under attack?” I asked.
“We do,” Hickory said. “There have been numerous attacks since the destruction of the Conclave fleet.”
“Then you know that the Colonial Union will have to make choices as to which colonies it needs to defend and which it will sacrifice. And that Roanoke is more likely to be in that second category.”
“We know this,” Hickory said.
“But you’ll still do nothing to help us,” I said.
“Not so long as Roanoke remains part of the Colonial Union,” Hickory said.
Jane was on this before I could open my mouth. “Explain that,” she said.
“An independent Roanoke would require a new response from us,” Hickory said. “If Roanoke declares itself independent of the Colonial Union, the Obin would feel obliged to offer support and aid on an interim basis until the Colonial Union reacquired the planet or agreed to its succession.”
