Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

And while Earth was still seen as the predominant force in the alliance, Olech’s power to influence the others was not absolute.

  The short train slowed to a halt, and Olech saw one of the reasons why he wasn’t considered a target by the government of at least one alliance member. Thick, rust-­red hair fell to the shoulders of an attractive woman wearing a blue business suit that matched her eyes. Average height and weight, she showed a few minor wrinkles that came from an expressive face that wasn’t afraid to laugh. The woman smiled warmly at the train, even though the glass was reflective and she couldn’t be sure if Olech was watching.

  But he always was, so she had no doubts.

  The platform was bathed in a bright glow from above that suggested a skylight even though they were directly underneath the broad tower that was Olech’s home and place of business. A tile mosaic made up of tiny lacquered squares covered the walls around the platform and the tunnel for many yards, a design conceived by the redheaded woman. Even the guard station had been subsumed into the tableau, which had the overall effect of transforming the tunnel and the platform into a dock on a subterranean river.

  Olech was the first off the train, and the woman stood waiting until he covered the distance and took her in his arms. She stood immobile on purpose, so that the embrace would not occur in the path of the numerous staffers who would be detraining as well. The chairman’s retinue was a busy group, and they passed the man and the woman in a long-­standing longstanding tradition where they utterly ignored them.

  In continuance of this homecoming custom, the members of Olech’s immediate staff moved quickly to the waiting elevators and headed up into the complex. Alone now except for the guards, Olech broke the kiss but kept the embrace.

  “Coming back to you is always so special. Even when I’ve only been gone for a while.”

  “You were gone?” Reena’s eyes twinkled, and he pulled her in tight again.

  Nuzzling her marvelous hair, Olech recalled how the woman in his arms had come into his life as a minister from Celestia, a rich planet where her brother ran the show. Her political genius and diplomatic acumen had attracted him right from the start, but they’d worked together for years before declaring their mutual affection. That had been long after his wife had died, when even the most libertine of his allies had begun to question the steady succession of women passing through his bed. Beautiful, every one of them, but none of them befitting a man of his station.

  Reena Corlipso had put an end to all of that, and even if Olech suspected she’d been urged to do so by his partners—­and especially her brother—­it made no difference because it made so much sense. Earth and Celestia were the two biggest players in the alliance and, like an arranged marriage of old, the pairing of Olech and Reena had brought the governments of both worlds much closer together.

  It didn’t hurt that the two of them were also an excellent match and that the bond between them was genuine.

  “How is Jan?” Her words brought him back to a less pleasant reality, and Olech gave her a slight headshake. Taking his hand, Reena turned toward the waiting elevator.

  A short time later, Olech Mortas burst through the rippling surface of his private swimming pool. The pool doubled as his safe room, where he and Reena could discuss the topics they did not wish overheard—­which meant they spent a lot of time there.

  Reena had continued her tile-­mosaic motif in the room’s decoration, so that the chairman’s seal stood out boldly on the pool’s light blue floor. When the lights were turned down, as they were now, the arched ceiling resembled a medieval painting of the night sky. Brightly colored planets whirled in the dark background, the sun wore a happy expression, and comets dragged sparking tails behind them.

  Reena was waiting for him when he swam up, her arms spread along the side of the pool while she bicycled her legs under the water. The red hair was braided behind her head, and the water lapped against her nipples as he swam over. Forty years old, born the year the war began, Reena Corlipso was what Olech considered a real woman. Her breasts were large and her hips curved away from her waist, but her muscles were toned and her blue eyes were alive with intelligence. They kissed for a long time before he pulled her away from the side, his long legs just reaching the bottom at that end of the pool. They slowly twirled in place, gently bouncing as he pushed them along, trying to take her into deeper water.

  “No.” She gave him a firm look. “We need to talk first.”

  He held on, still pulling Reena away from the shallow end, but her strong arms slipped from around his neck and easily pushed him off. Both of them routinely swam laps for exercise, and Reena gracefully glided off toward a small spillway where water flowed into the pool. A break in the wall allowed access to a round tub equipped with underwater jets, and Olech obediently followed her into it. A continuous stream of heated water flowed across them as they sat on a submerged bench, and she let him kiss her again before they began to speak, close in and quiet.

  “I’m sorry Jan didn’t take the offer.”

  “Maybe I should have followed your advice and made the announcement before seeing him. Left him nowhere to go.”

  “He still might have refused. And then where would you be?”

  “Probably making a second announcement about my brave son asking to be sent back to the war zone instead of becoming an ambassador . . . which we should probably do anyway.” A brief shake of the head. “Kid doesn’t trust me at all. Neither of them do.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe it’s time to tell them.”

  “There’s never going to be a time. I can give them the absolute truth about their mother and their upbringing, and they’ll just assume it’s one more lie. Look at Ayliss. She took a job she didn’t want with an outfit she despises just so she can dig around for something that could embarrass me. She’s getting better at slipping my surveillance, and she’s got that fool Selkirk helping her do it.”

  “She’ll get tired of playing revenge soon enough. And even if she does find something, we’ll just muddy the waters. Not like we haven’t done it before.”

  Another kiss, in gratitude. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Sure you do—­you’d be miserable again. All those years, and I was right in front of you the whole time.”

  He nuzzled her ear, then spoke directly into it in a voice almost too low to hear. Olech described everything that Jander had told him about the alien, finishing with, “The thing communicated with him telepathically, through two decon chamber walls. Sound and images. Jan said at one point it was as if he was reliving the creature’s injury, when they were hijacking the Wren.”

  “Do you think we’ve finally seen one of the Sims’ creators?”

  “Maybe. Everything we suspect about whatever made the Sims has been conjecture, so it’s hard to know. It would have to be incredibly advanced, so a telepathic entity that can change its shape to replicate a living human certainly fits that description.

  “But why only one of them? Was this some sort of probe?”

  “Can we be sure there was only one? Command hasn’t always been reliable about what’s happening in the zone.”

  “They were pretty rattled by this. And they didn’t hesitate to pass the word to every unit out there. Every Forcemember in the war zone knows what happened, and yet there hasn’t been a single report about anything like what Jan encountered.”

  “They said they detected a plague virus on the alien?”

  “Yes.” Olech’s whisper was long for a single syllable. “That part makes no sense at all. Why would it be carrying something like that? Even if it infected the entire corps headquarters, even if it wiped them out, a virus wouldn’t have gone far beyond that. Very low payoff, when you consider the delivery system.”

  “Think it was for deception, in case the thing was found out? Conceal its true purpose?”

>   “Exactly. According to Jan, the alien told him it was all a ruse right from the start. It said they included a Spartacan Scout among the maroons because a Spartacan would have to head for a high-­level headquarters with the information that he’d found a new Sim colony. That’s one reason they ended up at Glory Main.”

  “That Spartacan would have been passed even higher if his information was important enough.”

  “That’s true, but once the group got back to Force control the alien probably wouldn’t have continued up the chain with the scout.” He shook his head. “None of this makes any sense.”

  Reena waited, comfortable in his embrace and enjoying the rush of warm water, but after a time Olech merely leaned his head against hers and went silent. She admired his ability to mentally dismantle the many complex machinations of their political rivals—­and allies—­but she’d also come to know when he’d simply shut down the machine. She let him rest for a time, then spoke.

  “There is one thing we do know, and we’re going to have to prepare a response. The heads of the coalition planets are never going to believe that the alien selected Jander by chance.”

  “Apparently it did. The thing told Jan that it believed his status as my missing son was what blew its cover.”

  “I don’t doubt that, but none of the other heads, or even your fellow senators, are going to believe it. And it doesn’t help that it took place in Glory Corps space.”

  “The Senate’s Own.”

  “The most political corps in the war zone. Add in that this was Jan’s first assignment, and it stinks of some kind of secret negotiation gone wrong.”

  His hands had tightened on her shoulders, making Reena understand that Olech had never even considered this possibility. The fingers relaxed almost immediately.

  “What should we do about that?”

  “Nothing.” She shifted around to look into his eyes. “They won’t believe any explanation we offer anyway. If they make an outright accusation, we ask them just why we told so many ­people about the alien if we were clandestinely communicating with it. And why, if we were trying to keep this quiet, we had Jan bring the thing to a corps headquarters where it was promptly incinerated.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Believe it or not, we got lucky when Jan turned you down. If you’d made him an ambassador after so short a time in the war zone, it would have proven all the suspicions. But he went back out, and as a new lieutenant looking for assignment to a combat platoon, so they’ll at least have to wonder. About that, and about something else.”

  “Which is?”

  “If this really was a secret meeting between your son and this incredible creature . . . what do you know now that they wish they knew too?”

  The room was in the very core of the broad tower that stood in the dead center of the Unity Plaza complex. It was physically blocked off from the outside world and, although it wasn’t as large as Olech’s pool-­cum–safe room, its ceiling was just as high. Its bare gray walls lacked Reena’s artistic touch, and its only fixture was a high-­backed chair with black cushioning. All hard angles and no legs, the seat looked like it had been carved out of a block of dark stone.

  Olech Mortas sat down in it, alone, as the chamber’s doors sealed him inside. His thoughts were scattered now, something he recognized as his mind’s reaction to having focused on too many interconnected issues for too long. Using a complicated series of secure video communications, he’d personally briefed the alliance’s senior leaders on the alien’s appearance. Despite their loudly stated surprise, Olech suspected some of them had already learned of the creature’s existence. It was impossible to keep the story hidden, and the disinformation campaign for the masses had already begun. As suggested by both Reena and Hugh Leeger, Olech had not disclosed the entity’s telepathic communication with Jan.

  No matter how the truth was shaded or bent, there was no denying that the alien represented an enormous change to the war. And even though he’d been waiting for such an event for a very long time, Olech Mortas now needed to view the entire conflict with fresh eyes. His palms rested on the wide, flat arms of the boxy chair, and the fingers of his right hand touched a control panel that he now activated. The room’s dim light vanished, leaving him in darkness, and the voice of a trusted technician spoke through the void.

  “Ready, sir?”

  “Go ahead.” Olech wondered if Jan’s telepathic experience with the alien had been like that, a disembodied voice coming at his psyche from out of nowhere, but the room came alive and he refocused his thoughts. Light flickered across the blackness, and the chair began to move. A single lifting cylinder slowly slid upward, raising him to the very center of the space.

  And that was exactly what the room was. Space. The chair itself vanished, giving Olech the illusion that he was free-­floating. The light waves finished their work, and Earth blossomed out of the darkness as if he were viewing its creation. Blue water, brown terrain, and white cloud that blocked his vision as if he were orbiting the home planet in a space suit.

  The projected imagery combined decades’ worth of charting and outright simulation, but it was the only way that Olech Mortas could keep the vast array of vital information in perspective. Using the chair’s control panel or, more commonly, directing the technicians by voice, he could figuratively travel anywhere in the mapped regions of the cosmos.

  “Take me to the construction zone.”

  The Earth receded swiftly, giving the impression that he had turned away from it. The chair itself could rotate a full revolution, but usually the projected imagery performed the movements. Olech could have asked to start out at the construction zone, the belts of space stations cranking out the ships and weapons and engines of the war, but it was more fun to take the ride.

  The construction zone was nowhere near the war zone, but it was a great distance away from any of the inhabited planets and so he flashed through an enormous amount of space in just a few moments. No rocket could travel that fast, and no one could get to either zone without the aid of the Step, but all the same Olech liked to imagine he was strapped to the nose of a racing ship spearing its way through the void. Boiling dust and bizarre arrays of light were the most common sights when he moved like this, and Olech was always struck by just how dirty it all seemed. Like diving into even the clearest ocean water and being surprised by the particles and the seaweed and the undifferentiated fragments that drifted in constant suspension.

  A hair-­thin line of white resolved itself into the construction zone a moment later, and he felt vertigo when the projection slowed, then stopped. The titanic rigs were everywhere, maximizing the advantage of zero gravity to create the machines of combat and send them forward without having to break free from the surfaces and atmospheres of the grasping planets. Shuttles and drone robots passed between and among the stations, and various ships of war stood perpetual guard.

  Clicking on a button brought up a small arrow of light that he maneuvered using sensors in the chair’s arm. Stopping the arrow on a station caused a status to appear next to it, reflecting its current productivity and supply levels. Large teams of technicians and analysts monitored these statistics for him, but Olech had his own reasons to review them personally in this format. The stations in the construction zone had been paid for by the alliance, but they were run by interplanetary corporations that often followed agendas tangential to his own.

  Despite the army-­sized staff that supported him, Olech was able to memorize and collate vast amounts of data in his head. More importantly, he knew what was significant and how it all came together, which was one of the primary purposes of this room. The war zone was confusing enough all by itself, starting with the very human tendency to see it as a front line when it was no such thing. If seen from far enough away, it certainly did appear as a barrier between the approaching Sims and the inhabited planets, but it was by no means a cohesi
ve defensive belt.

  Mankind might be fighting the Sims for the habitable planets in a vast but limited region of space, but that zone was constantly shifting because the planets themselves, and everything around them, never stopped moving. Sim fleets had appeared out of nowhere many times during the war, all without Step technology, and so Olech Mortas had trained himself to think in terms of threats that could come from any and every direction. Among its many benefits, the room helped him to maintain that orientation.

  “Take me to Platinus,” he ordered, and the void whirled in front of his eyes. Flashes of light that could have been comets or distant suns, the sensation of flying, long stretches of pure blackness hammering home the distances in humanity’s war with the Sims. At one point the entire room flickered red, just for a moment, and a mechanical voice announced that he had crossed the CHOP line. The acronym was originally a nautical term indicating the boundaries between fleets at sea, but the CHOP line in this conflict was of even wider import. It marked the beginning of the military’s jurisdiction in space, and the coalition government had established numerous laws with extraordinary penalties for crossing the boundary without authorization—­both ways.

  Once again Olech experienced the impossible deceleration, before a single habitable planet in one of the many solar systems of the war came into focus. Only a few years earlier it had been designated UP-­2716. UP stood for Unoccupied Planet, and the four digits that followed were selected at random for reasons of information security. The Sim enemy might not be able to comprehend or even form the sounds of human speech, but they understood numbers, and so the four digits identifying a planet in the war zone followed no set order. When the Sims had landed on UP-­2716 it had become EP-­2716, Enemy Planet 2716, until the landing of human troops had changed it to CP-­2716. Contested Planet 2716.

  When the Force had triumphed there, CP-­2716 had become Secured Planet 2716 or SP-­2716. Only after a planet was secured did it receive a name, and this one had been called Platinus because of the vast deposits of minerals vital to the war effort that had been discovered there.