The Shadow of Cincinnatus

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Good,” he said. “The fleet will advance to the Asimov Point, then prepare to launch drones.”

  The Asimov Point itself was invisible, at least to the naked eye. On the display, however, it was a tight knot of gravity, twisted into a shape that was never consistent from one moment to the next. Spacers had strange dreams close to the Asimov Points, Roman had been told, although he’d never shared them himself. Perhaps it was the sense of abiding wrongness surrounding the points – no one had managed to prove any of the theories that attempted to justify their existence – or perhaps it was just night terrors. It was never easy to relax near an Asimov Point, even in friendly territory. There was no way to be sure that something hostile wouldn’t pop out and open fire.

  He recalled, once, a bull session in the barracks, back at the academy. The senior cadets, having taken on the duty of alternately supporting and scaring the hell out of the junior cadets, had whispered a tale about super-advanced aliens creating the Asimov Points. It explained why they were so strange, they’d said, and why they didn’t seem to follow a predictable pattern. The one cadet who’d asked the instructors about the legend had been told, in no uncertain terms, to keep his mouth shut. Federation orthodoxy claimed that the human race was the most advanced race known to exist – and ever would exist. Suggesting that an alien race could have created the Asimov Points called all that into question.

  “The drones are ready for launch,” Palter said. “Sir?”

  Roman looked up at the holographic display. “Launch the drones.”

  He braced himself as the drones sped towards the Asimov Point and vanished. They had neither the mass nor the shields of full-sized starships, which meant an alarmingly high number of them would simply be lost to the Asimov Point itself, let alone anything lurking on the far side. It was not beyond possibility that none of them would return, even without enemy action. But he needed to know what was waiting for them, if anything was waiting for them. Sending his ships through the point one by one was a good way to get them smashed, one by one. And none of them would know they were flying into hell until the missiles were already screaming towards their hulls.

  Seconds passed...and, eventually, four drones popped back into existence. It was a better return rate than he’d dared hope, Roman knew, although the drones might still be useless. He watched, knowing there was no point in ordering his crews to hurry up, as the drones transmitted their data back to the fleet. There seemed to be nothing hostile on the far side of the point.

  “Send the first formation through,” Roman ordered. If there was a cloaked enemy fleet lurking just outside active sensor range, they might well have seen the drones pop in and out of the system. “And hold the second formation ready for immediate deployment.”

  The lead squadron of superdreadnaughts moved up to the Asimov Point and vanished. Long seconds passed, then a set of courier drones materialized around the point. Nothing had greeted them, the superdreadnaughts reported. The system appeared to be completely empty.

  “Take the rest of the fleet through the point,” Roman ordered. “And then deploy for immediate departure from the system.”

  The superdreadnaught shivered slightly as she passed through the Asimov Point, the display blanking out and then hastily rebooting itself. Green icons were spreading out around the Asimov Point, but there were no signs of anything hostile. There had never been any fortresses or even automated combat platforms placed near the Asimov Point, according to the files. The kind of investment that demanded heavy defenses was rarely made along the Rim.

  “Local space seems clear,” Palter said. “Should I ping the planet, sir?”

  “No,” Roman said. “Keep us well clear of them.”

  He sighed. There was an inhabited planet in the system, but it was only a stage-one colony. It was quite possible the inhabitants didn’t have the slightest idea that enough firepower to destroy a thousand such colonies was passing through their system, or that the Federation had suddenly found itself fighting a whole new war. Such systems would be prizes for the winner, nothing else. They certainly couldn’t contribute anything to either side.

  “Aye, sir,” Palter said.

  “Set course for Boston,” Roman ordered. Thanks to the crazy lines between Asimov Points, they were now only a week from Boston by stardrive. And there was little prospect of being ambushed, now their course was no longer predictable. “Best possible speed.”

  His console chimed. “Commodore, this is Briggs in Combat Intelligence,” a new voice said. “There’s something here I think you should see.”

  Roman rose to his feet. “I’m on my way.” He took one final look at the empty display, reassuring himself that the fleet was alone. Or, at least, that any enemy forces within the system were disinclined to engage. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  And if they had caught us, he thought, as he strode through the superdreadnaught’s plain white passageways, it might not have been a bad sign.

  The thought made him roll his eyes. It had been less than a century since the Blue Star War had taught the Federation the dangers of trying to be too clever in wartime. If the Outsiders had made the same mistake, it might have given the Federation a chance to turn the tables quickly, without having to rebuild and reinforce its forces first. But they’d clearly been careful enough to avoid spreading their forces too thin.

  He stepped into the Combat Intelligence Center and nodded to Specialist Briggs. Combat Intelligence sounded like a great idea, on the surface, but Roman had learned their limitations very early on. In theory, they could intercept and decipher enemy transmissions, allowing the Federation ships to identify the enemy flagship; in practice, their insights tended to come too late to be useful. And where aliens were concerned, the insights were rarely accurate. There were even officers who believed that Combat Intelligence should be stepped down, their duties assigned to other intelligence personnel. It was one of the few cost-cutting measures that had won approval from the vast majority of naval officers.

  “Specialist,” he said. Intelligence officers were never in the chain of command, something that rankled badly with them and had led to more than a few fights on leave. “What do you have for me?”

  Briggs cleared his throat, loudly. He was a tall man, going slowly bald on top, wearing a dark blue uniform that didn’t quite disguise his growing paunch. Roman guessed – there was no time to review his file – that he’d been in the service for decades and was probably not a little resentful of his slow rise in the ranks. And he was probably too old to switch to command track. After the first battles with Admiral Justinian, anyone who might have made command material would have been encouraged to switch. The Navy had been short of skilled commanding officers.

  “As always,” Briggs said, “we picked up a great deal of data from the star system before we dropped into FTL. It was all recorded, then scanned for anything potentially useful. Most of it is garbage, unsurprisingly, but one piece of information in particular was very interesting.”

  Roman frowned. Intelligence had been known to make mistakes. No one had predicted Admiral Justinian’s attempt at a coup, even though it was a potential risk. But then, Admiral Justinian had had years to lay his plans and make sure his bases were secure.

  So did the Outsiders, Roman thought. They surprised us completely.

  He leaned forward. “What did you find?”

  “This,” Briggs said. He tapped his console, meaningfully. “A sealed packet of data, encrypted with a Federation Intelligence code.”

  Roman blinked in surprise. “And you didn’t bring this to me earlier?”

  “It wasn’t identified until now,” Briggs said. His tone stiffened, defensively. “The packet wasn’t designed to attract attention, Commodore. I believe it was forwarded through a number of datanodes, the escorting program clearing the way for further transmission, then wiping all traces of its passage from the datanet. If it had been specifically tagged ‘Federation Intelligence’ it might well have been c
aught in a buffer somewhere.”

  “Fine,” Roman said. “What does it actually say?”

  “We haven’t been able to decipher it all,” Briggs said. “What we have been able to decipher, by applying a standard Federation Intelligence Key, is a warning about the Outsiders and a surprising amount of tactical data and observations. There’s quite a bit of data within the packet, sir. It will take some time to evaluate.”

  Briggs paused. “The remaining encrypted sections will need to be returned to Earth,” he added, slowly. “They’re impossible to decrypt without the proper key.”

  Roman nodded. Communications security wasn’t his speciality, but he understood just how hard it could be to decrypt an encoded message. Some of them even had special functions that automatically erased the message if there was more than one failed attempt to decrypt it, no matter what the communications officers did. It annoyed him not to know what was in the sealed parts of the packet, but he would just have to wait.

  “I see,” Roman said. “Why were some parts of it accessible and other parts kept sealed?”

  “Well, they weren’t accessible without the standard key,” Briggs said. He launched into a complicated explanation, which ended by noting that any Federation Intelligence officer would have access to a standard key. “I suspect whoever sent us the packet wanted to make sure that whoever got it could access the data, without being able to decrypt anything that might compromise his identity. There’s precedent for that, I believe.”

  “Very well,” Roman said. The identity of the mystery agent could wait. “Have the sealed part of the message returned to Earth. Then send my staff copies of the unsealed pieces of intelligence...”

  “I should warn you, sir, that this information will betray at least one piece of data to the enemy,” Briggs said. “It should be heavily restricted.”

  Roman’s eyes narrowed...and then he understood. Presumably, the Outsiders didn’t know they had a mole, even though they’d used infiltrators of their own in attacking Athena. The mere presence of the data packet, even assuming it could not be cracked without the right key, would reveal the existence of the mole. And then the Outsiders would start hunting for a spy. The thought of sending them off on a witch-hunt, with all the problems the Grand Senate’s hunt for moles had caused the Federation, was amusing...but also unacceptable. It was, at the very least, well above his pay grade.

  And, at worst, it will betray one of us to the enemy, he thought, crudely. The Federation Navy stressed loyalty to one’s fellows, which was particularly ironic in the wake of the Justinian War. Interviews with some of the survivors had convinced Emperor Marius that most of them had been more loyal to the ideal of the Federation than to the Grand Senate...

  He shook his head. No, he wouldn’t betray the mole. But the data would still have to be analyzed.

  “Send it to my terminal,” he ordered, finally. “I’ll review it personally. Keep the rest of it firmly in-house, at least until you have something to present to my command staff.”

  “Aye, sir,” Briggs said. He sounded pleased, if only because he’d gotten what he wanted – and kept control of the data. “I’ll prepare the remainder for transmission to Earth.”

  Assuming no one has managed to cut the chain of Asimov Points to Earth, Roman thought. It would still be two to three months before anything reached Emperor Marius. By then, who knew what might have happened. But we have to do the best we can.

  “Good,” Roman said.

  He stood, walked out of the Combat Intelligence Center and down to the sickbay. There hadn’t been any casualties on Valiant – the ship had barely been touched – but a number of smaller ships had had to tranship their wounded to the superdreadnaught, which had a considerably larger medical center. Roman winced, inwardly, as he saw the men and women lying on the beds, some so badly injured that they would have to be shipped home to a proper hospital. The stasis pods, he’d been told, were already overloaded.

  “Commodore,” one man called. He wore the uniform of a missile tech, but his uniform’s arms had been cut away. One glance told Roman why. His arms ended in stumps. “Look! No hands!”

  Roman had to conceal his horror. The thought of losing one’s hands was particularly horrific. They could be replaced, he knew, either through prosthetics or vat-grown replacements, but it was still unpleasant. But visiting the injured was part of his duties. It wasn’t one he could palm off on anyone else.

  “I was on Hawking,” the missile tech said. He seemed to be in good hmor, despite his wounds. Roman suspected he’d been drugged. “One moment, everything was fine; the next, pieces of metal take my hands! It was awful. Blood was everywhere. And then we just started giggling!”

  “Giggling?” Roman repeated. “Why?”

  The man smirked. “Do you know how hard it is to get a girl when you’re a lowly missile tech?”

  Roman shook his head.

  “They think we’re lazy buggers, the lot of us,” the man continued. “Now, how can they say I wasn’t injured on active duty?”

  “They can’t,” Roman said. He shook his head, tiredly. “And you’ll be back with them soon enough.”

  “I want metal hands,” the man said. “It looks more impressive.”

  “It does,” Roman agreed.

  Silently, he moved on to the next casualty.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Owing to the number of known Asimov Point connections between Boston and Earth, it took no less than three months for Emperor Marius to become aware of the attacks along the Rim and the Fall of Athena. By then, the Emperor was well aware of just how much damage had been done in the Core Worlds.

  -The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

  Earth, 4098

  “Put the message on,” Marius ordered, once his full cabinet had assembled in the briefing room. “Run it right from the start.”

  There was a pause, then a hologram of a woman appeared in front of them. A stream of data running along the bottom identified her as Senator Chang Li, the Representative from Nova Athena. Marius remembered her; she’d been the sole senator he’d met who hadn’t belonged to any of the two main political factions. Just how she’d managed to get onto a committee responsible for interrogating Marius, after his unavoidable failure along the Rim, was beyond him. She shouldn’t have been anything more than a lone voice, crying out in the darkness.

  But she was heavily outvoted on the committee in any case, he thought, as the recording began. The Grand Senators might have calculated that giving her the post would have looked good, without forcing them to compromise their power.

  He shrugged. The Grand Senators were dead. It was quite possible he’d never know.

  “Emperor Marius,” Senator Chang Li said. Her voice was oddly accented now, which puzzled him until he realized she’d been deliberately mimicking Earth’s dialect when he’d last met her. The Grand Senators believed out-world accents to be a sign of barbarism, all the better to justify keeping the colonies under strict control. “We would prefer to have spoken with you openly, in person, but we would not trust you or your former masters with our safety. Besides, there is little to negotiate.

  “I represent the Outsider Federation, a union of worlds from beyond the Rim that have gathered together to resist the endless advance of the Federation. I will not bore you with a recitation of the crimes committed by the Federation against innocent settlers, who have lost everything they built when the Grand Senate decided it wanted what they had. You know the crimes of the Grand Senate – and the Federation – as well as I do. I speak now of the future.

  “It is our intention to liberate ourselves from your control and remove all threat of future oppression,” she continued. “By the time you receive this message, you will have seen our first blows directed against your organs of control. Your network of bases along the Rim has been disrupted and your industries attacked, even within the Core Worlds themselves. The balance of power has shifted in our favor.”

  Marius gritted h
is teeth as the words rolled on.

  “In hopes of ending this war with minimal casualties, we extend to you the following offer,” Chang continued. “You will concede our independence from your control, now and forever. Each and every one of the worlds along the Rim will hold a plebiscite, where they will vote to remain in the Federation, join us or become independent in their own right. We will both agree to honor the results of their referendums.

  “If you agree to these terms, we will have peace. There will be room for both of us to breathe and recover from the war. There will be a boom in interstellar trade and economic growth for both of us. But if you refuse, we will fight this war until the Federation is completely destroyed, for we know better than to expect mercy if the Federation wins. You may send your reply back to Athena, using the attached code. We eagerly await your reply.”

  There was a pause, then the holographic image blinked out of existence.

  “Traitor,” General Standerton Thorne growled. “She was a Senator.”

  “Not the most promising of recommendations,” Tully agreed. “I...”

  “It gets worse,” Commodore Arunika said. She cut Tully off with practiced ease. “We have analyzed the recordings from the Battle of Athena and the data packet sent back to us by a covert agent. The news is not good.”

  She paused for dramatic effect. “We’re not just fighting humans,” she said. “The Outsider Federation – interesting choice of name, by the way – includes at least two alien races.”

  Marius fought to keep his face under control. Protecting humanity from aliens was one of the prime reasons for the Federation’s existence. Even now, it was a rare alien who was allowed to leave his homeworld – or the colony world his race might have settled, before they encountered the human race. Aliens were alien. They could not be trusted, let alone honored with the full rights and obligations of humans. And the Outsiders were turning them into soldiers? Giving them access to human weapons and training? It could not be borne.