Here Be Dragons

by Alan, Craig

  “Oh?”

  “If we built nukes to use against the outsiders, then we built more than one—they could always miss the target,” Vijay said. “And plutonium is expensive, while the independents can barely keep their satellites in orbit. I sincerely doubt they could afford to build more than one nuke—not that they would need more. The damage has already been done.”

  “The election.” Vijay nodded. “That would have been good timing. But if there was only one nuke, how could they be sure that we’d fire it?”

  “I suppose they would need a man on the inside,” Vijay said. “Inside this room.”

  Elena changed the subject.

  “Tell no one, and keep me informed,” she said, and kicked off the chair for the door. Vijay pulled another shell off the rack.

  Elena returned to her stateroom to begin her paperwork. But after five minutes after her desk, she had to read a single order, let alone sign it.

  She had assumed that the nuke had been built by the Agency, and intended for the outsiders. That was the only possible reason she could imagine for placing it on an Archangel, the only ships created to take the fight to the outside. It had never occurred to her that she had found the plutonium less than a week before the eection.

  Any nuclear reactor which bred the plutonium-238 inside the isotopic batteries could easily create plutonium-239 as well, and the Agency reactor was an open secret, well known but never officially acknowledged, its location the most closely guarded secret in the world. But Elena would have wagered Gabriel herself that it was up here, sharing an orbit with her, right now. The Union had entrusted it to the Space Agency, the one Global entity that did not involve itself in Earth politics. No nation would ever admit to having one on its soil—its own citizens would riot.

  But there were exceptions to every rule. The smoking craters in Australia and Brazil and the Congo—supposedly all that remained of the independent nuclear programs—were testimony to that.

  On a whim, she logged back into the globenet and ran a search, and narrowed the results to those within the last week. It was a common name she searched for, so she had to sift through a lot of junk. Elena filtered the results by election news, and there it was, on the Times channel. The video’s caption said it had been recorded the day before, in the Australian desert. The stridently internationalist Lunar Times was not in the habit of going there for commentary on Global politics. And more strangely still, the subject was not identified by any nationality, but simply as a spokesman for the Alliance for Sovereignty.

  He was short, but the camera didn’t know that. His black hair had grayed and receded at the temple, and he was dressed simply for the hot weather in a cotton shirt and pants. She could see the sweat beading on his forehead just standing still. The land behind him was lush and verdant, and wavered in the heat. The vegetation was a soybean farm, painstakingly grafted onto the desert. Its straight green edges clashed with the yellow dust of the wasteland which surrounded it. Australia had been completely embargoed since the Nuclear Crisis, and ate only what they could grow or smuggle.

  The interviewer’s questions, lobbed from a comfortable bureau office in Jakarta, were probing, tough, and eventually hostile. His own past came up repeatedly, which was undoubtedly why the Times had sought the interview. But it was easy to see that he had once been a politician. He deftly parried and riposted with an elan that Elena could not remember, and admired despite herself. And his stilted but earnest English provided an earthy contrast to the interviewer’s lofty elocution. She closed with a biting lament that exiles could not vote in Global elections.

  “My voice will be my vote,” he said. “Vote Sovereign, and for a true peace on Earth.”

  When the video ended, Elena saw that it had been viewed more than a million times in less than twenty four hours. She had not expected his novelty value to be so high. It had been fifteen years, after all, and she had doubted that anyone but her own countrymen still remembered the name Ernesto Gonzales.

  Elena climbed, feet first, along the ladder that led to the dock. She felt herself grow heavier, kilo by kilo. Gabriel hung suspended at the center of the hollow cylinder that was Glenn Station, connected umbilically like a child in the womb, and as the station rotated around its longest axis the ship spun as well. But since rotation is always faster at the edge than at the center, Gabriel lacked the artificial gravity that was provided aboard Glenn. It was an odd feeling to be spun faster and faster around, for her legs to weigh as much as her torso. She felt as if an invisible hand had grabbed her waist and was pulling her down the tube and away from Gabriel, and she became dizzy from the sensation. But then her feet hit the floor, and the moment passed.

  She hadn’t expected a welcoming party.

  “Good to see you, Elena,” Chief Officer Recip Erdogan said, extending his hand. He was her replacement as Glenn’s commanding officer, and would lead the skeleton crew set to take over for the crew of Gabriel. They shook, and Vijay saluted. “Everyone’s waiting in the lounge.”

  As they walked—Glenn’s gravity was about half of Earth normal, which was just enough to put in a spring in her step—Vijay said to her, “Everyone not on duty, that is. Second Officer Okoye will not be joining us.” His search of the ballista ammunition had revealed nothing.

  “Be good,” Elena whispered.

  After spending the day in Gabriel’s tight corridors and cramped compartments, Glenn Station’s main lounge should have seemed cavernous to Elena. But after the canyon that was Maginus City, it didn’t seem like much. The walls were off white and softly curved to please the eye, and there was room to hold almost a hundred people more or less comfortably, but the lack of a third dimension left it seeming intolerably crowded to Elena. And standing pinned against the inside of a rotating barrel made her feel as if she were always walking uphill.

  She made an exception for the long windows that had been set into the floor, like a glass bottom boat. At first Elena had hated the idea of anything but a firm bulkhead in between her and the vacuum. But after that morning—or evening, depending on how she chose to look at it—in the observation bubble above Maginus, she had begun to see the appeal of the skylights.

  Elena walked over to one and looked down, too suspicious to step on it directly. The skies beneath her feet were black, lit with streams of soft gold—the lights from Earth’s sleeping cities. This was a view that would have been impossible just a few decades before, when megatons of ash and smoke had blocked out the sun. Two centuries of climate change had been wiped out by a few days of nuclear war, and temperatures had plunged worldwide and dragged the planet into a long winter that had yet to truly end. If it had been daylight, Elena would have been able to see snow in Russia and Scandinavia that hadn’t melted in a century.

  But it was in nighttime in Asia now, and she began to count those cities which were missing—Seoul, Pyongyang, Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Lhasa, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Tehran. To the far east were the dimmed home islands of Japan, depopulated by emigration, starvation, and suicide. To the far west was the lonely crater where a black market Soviet warhead had annihilated Tel Aviv in 2048—the first of many, the Storm’s opening act. When the Western Hemisphere rose to meet her in a few minutes, Elena would be able to see the black holes of the old United States—Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Wichita, Austin, Boulder, Sacramento, San Diego. Restive cities that the President, then in his ninth term at his capital in Cheyenne Mountain, had summarily executed before the chief of his Secret Service detail had put two bullets in his head and turned the gun on herself.

  Suddenly Elena didn’t want to be in the lounge anymore. But it wouldn’t do for the crew to see the Chief leave before the polls had even closed.

  Vijay took a spot behind the bar—of course—and Demyan Yukovych saluted lazily from his stool, a glass of something clear and cold in his hand. Marco Montessori sat on a couch at the c
enter of the room and held court among the deck crew. Europeans were still relatively rare in the Space Agency—now that the Gulf Stream seemed to have returned for good, many of the more adventuresome among them chose to stay on the Continent and rebuild the old cities. Only the Russians and the British joined up in great numbers, following the footsteps of Avramovich and Azzam.

  Over the next thirty minutes Elena managed to make the rounds with every member of her crew present, as well as a few of Erdogan’s people. Gabriel would depart on the trial cruise in a few days, and the leisurely attitude of port would pass with her. But for now, she could enjoy their presence. Gabriel was virtually unmanned at the moment, and there were only three faces missing—Rivkah Golus, Ikenna Okoye, and Pascal Arnaud.

  She finally took a seat next to Hassoun, who was the only person in the room beside herself not holding a drink. He nodded a little too sharply, and she could see his Adam’s apple bob. His smile seemed to have been painted on his face, badly. At their first meeting a few weeks earlier, her new communications officer had looked ready to swallow his own tongue. She smiled back and remained quiet, so as not to force him to speak and embarrass himself again.

  It was almost 8 pm in Cairo, and the final polls were closing in the last time zone. Erdogan had given Vijay the honor of hosting the festivities, and from the bar he controlled the enormous screen which took up most of one entire wall. There was some brief skirmishing over which news channel would be chosen—the left-wing Transnational, the right-wing Nile, or the moderate Lunar Times. Vijay made an executive decision to choose the Times, over the protests of most of those assembled.

  Up on the screen went the Times’s map of the Earth’s continents, rendered as a patchwork of red, blue, gold, and white, against gray seas. At the bottom, where Antarctica would be, were the handful of seats allotted to the off-world colonists. The Times didn’t bother to display the two dozen or so independent nations at all. Instead they were colored the same slate gray as the oceans, as if they didn’t exist.

  Every citizen of the Global Union was represented by at least one of the districts contained on that map. Three out of every five seats were either red or blue, for the Socialists and Conservatives, and here and there were a few lonely green dots that represented the small parties, mostly religious and linguistic minorities. Liberal gold and Sovereigntist white held the balance.

  At the right side of the screen a running sidebar displayed feature stories by the Times staff. Vijay selected one and enlarged it, and a cheer arose for Helena Dixon, the Prime Minister of the Global Union. Elena watched her cut the ribbon at the brand new Station, back during her first term. She had always been a good friend of the Agency, and if any single person could be said to responsible for the Archangel Project, it was her. Back then, her hair had been almost as black as her skin. But the woman who’d gone global on the net a few days before to categorically deny the creation of a nuclear weapon had hair as white as her teeth.

  Dixon had fought for the American resistance while still in her teens, and moved on to local politics after the fall of Cheyenne Mountain. A decade later she had become mayor of her home city, her country’s capital. She had stayed in Atlanta for another twenty years as a Senator and President of the American Republic, and then come east to Cairo to serve as the head of her party in the Global Assembly. Her administration had taken a hard line towards the independents and championed an aggressive policy towards the outsiders, and she had been elected Prime Minister three straight times, a record that would almost certainly end tonight. A four decade carer, cut down in four days.

  Three other major candidates were competing, and after tonight one of two of them would take Dixon’s place. Elena recognized her opposite number, a former Defense Minister named Sir William Campbell-Azzam. His picture inspired even more cheers than Dixon had garnered. His martyred father had inspired the foundation of the Global Union itself, and was now the namesake of the Space Agency’s new headquarters. Campbell-Azzam had worn an unmatched five battle stars on his dress uniform own forty years of service had ended only when lymphoma had forced him out of the service uniform and back to his mother’s ancestral home in England. But Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen had taken himself out of the running the day before, and his party had reached out for a leader that all of Earth could rally behind.

  Elena also recognized Liang Lanying, the longtime leader of the Alliance for Sovereignty, now running for a fifth straight time in her trademark thick black eyeglasses and bun piled high atop her head. Now that the Cantonese legislature had voted for independence, this election held immense personal importance for her. If the Alliance won—and Liang had about as much chance of becoming the next Prime Minister as Elena herself—a nation would exit the Global Union for the first time since its formation.

  But the final hopeful, a white man of indeterminate nationality representing Liberal International, was completely foreign to her. His party of moderates favored stronger ties with the independent nations, and had actually spent more time in government than either of the hardline parties, though they were currently on the outside. But it was always as the junior partner, never the senior—the Liberals had never won an election outright, and were as anonymous as they were ubiquitous. Elena had never heard the man’s name in her life, and forgot it almost immediately.

  The timer rolled over from 20:59:59 to 21:00:00. Immediately, the votes began to pile up. A running tally hit seven figures almost instantly, and then eight. It would end the night with ten digits. By law, there had been no opinion surveys published in the last five days of the campaign—coincidentally the only five days since Overstar-12—and the exit polls would not be released until midnight. Until then, all they had was raw data.

  It was over an hour before the Times began to call individual races, those which were beyond a reasonable doubt. There were cheers and boos for each new result, mostly the latter. Hassoun remained quiet, speaking only when she did—maybe he was remaining circumspect in front of his commanding officer, or maybe he cared as little for politics as she did. Gabriel’s records had shown that forty two votes had been cast by the crew. Ikenna Okoye lacked Union citizenship, and Elena was one of the abstainers, but she would never ask if Hassoun was the other.

  Elena watched as, one by one, the red and blue dots on the screen turned gold. In a four way race, it didn’t take much of a swing to flip a seat. The left and right wing strongholds, in America and Russia and India and Manchuria, would remain loyal to their party. But nearly every swing seat was going for the Liberals, and they were going to shatter their previous best showing over a decade earlier. The depths they had reached in the aftermath of the Nuclear Crisis were now just a memory.

  At the bar, Vijay was playing the Times channel like a piano. He took the photo of the Liberal leader and enlarged it until the man’s face took up the entire screen. It would be a good night for the man with the weatherbeaten face and salt and pepper hair, and the gathered officers provided polite applause for the man who appeared almost certain to be their next commander-in-chief. The caption said that he was Dr. Jacob Erasmus, of Bloemfontein, South Africa.

  Her bracelet vibrated. Vijay wanted to speak with her.

  Elena excused herself to Hassoun and a slightly tipsy Second Officer of Erdogan’s who seemed untowardly interested in her political opinions. Hassoun smiled and nodded as she rose to leave. He had not had a drop all night.

  Vijay was slouched on a stool, his pad on the counter before him. Marco leaned next to him. There were three drinks sitting on the bar.

  “That one is for you,” Vijay said.

  “I don’t drink on active service, Vijay,” Elena said. “You know that.”

  “You will want to tonight,” Marco said.

  Vijay pushed the pad over so that she could see. “I haven’t put it up on the board,” he said. “But Marco and I have been examining the races that have yet to be called. And we have been
doing some math.”

  “And?” Elena didn’t really need to ask. She knew what he was going to say.

  “The Times is going to hold back until every country reports its results fully. The Transnational and the Nile will not say it either. But the Liberals will finish as the largest party, with a little over three hundred seats. And the coalition has collapsed. The Socialists and Conservatives will both drop to under two hundred.”

  “Five hundred and one are needed for a majority.”

  Vijay nodded.

  “The Alliance for Sovereignty will nearly double its number of seats. To just about two hundred.”

  “Madre de dios.”

  “Foxes in the henhouse,” Marco said, and drained his drink. Mathematically, the Liberals only had one possible coalition partner.

  The Treaty of Jerusalem did predate both the Union and the Agency, and the way Elena saw it, she owed it her loyalty first and foremost. She had sacrificed Helena Dixon willingly, but she hadn’t counted on who would take Dixon’s place. And now some of the highest chambers of the Global government would be filled by those who had vowed to destroy it. If Vijay was right, Elena had walked into the Alliance’s trap, and dragged her planet with her.

  Through the windows at her feet, the Earth shone serenely. She took her drink and swallowed it in a single gulp.

  Fata Morgana

  Elena awoke in her stateroom to darkness and thunder once more.

  “Alert stations, alert stations. Warning yellow, captain to the bridge.”

  “Lights, goddamnit!”

  She rolled and kicked herself out of the hammock, and launched straight for the door. It was still early morning according to her bracelet. At least she was already dressed this time.

  Her stateroom was only two compartments away from the bridge, and she had thought she had beaten the others to it. But Hassoun was already there, and sitting at the watch chair. That was odd—Officer Chung was the third shift officer of the watch, and Hassoun was scheduled to go on duty with her only two hours from now.