by Evan Currie
This human is dangerous despite her weapons, not because of them.
He would have preferred to keep his Sentinels together, but he was realistic enough to understand the issues they were facing on this world. The Alliance was not the most popular group to these humans, for reasons he could easily understand. Normally that was one of the last things Kriss would care for, but since they’d invited the humans’ forces to help, he wasn’t going to actively attempt to sabotage their efforts on his behalf.
He was a soldier; he wasn’t an idiot.
So he followed along, listened to every word, and mostly kept quiet. Aida, on the other hand, was chatting amiably with their new local guide, never letting silence last, and honestly seemed to be enjoying herself, as best he could tell.
Such an odd set of skills for a warrior of her caliber.
*****
“Main landing site was just over there,” Sasha Dalton said, nodding to a rusting hulk that dominated the view to their right.
“One of the early colony ships,” Sorilla said, looking it over. “I’ve read about them, but there was surprisingly little in the way of video or in-depth blueprints. What drive system did you use?”
“Orion.”
Sorilla’s eyes bugged out as she snapped back to look at Dalton before looking back to the hulk that was resting in the distance.
“That would explain why the official records are light,” Sorilla said. “I’m suddenly shocked that you ever managed to get it built in the first place.”
“We had powerful friends,” Dalton told her.
Sorilla was certain they had, but even that didn’t explain how anyone was insane enough to allow a noted group of supremacist fundamentalists to build an Orion-class vessel in Earth orbit. A base design Orion would require literally thousands of thermonuclear charges for propulsion, and unlike the antimatter system in a modern drive, those charges were not integral to the ship’s core.
A madman could easily have them removed from the drive chamber and redeployed in any way he chose.
Someone let that lunatic ship thousands of nuclear devices on orbital shuttles?
It didn’t make sense.
She filed it, pulsed it out to the SOL, and got her head back in the game.
“Must have been some ride,” she said, “landing that thing.”
“So they say,” Dalton chuckled as he drove. “Radiation was slightly elevated in the landing zone for a few decades, but nothing too bad.”
“We don’t design interstellar ships to land anymore,” Sorilla admitted. “It’s a little wasteful, and the new drives would do more than leave a little elevated background rads.”
“You leave colony ships parked in orbit and shuttle the people down?”
“Not exactly. We tether them to the planet and the people take the elevator to the surface,” Sorilla told him.
Dalton glanced sharply over. “You got the materials science to work for a space elevator? That’s incredible!”
“Our Alliance friends did us one better,” she said with only a slight twist to her tone as she said the word “friends.” “They play with gravity in far more efficient ways than we do, so far at least.”
She half turned, shooting Kriss a grin. The Lucian didn’t have expressions in the way humans generally recognized, but his grayish face twisted in an emulation of a human grin that would make most people nervous.
“Their big ships actually land and take off,” she said, looking back at Dalton. “We haven’t bothered with that yet, though it’s only a matter of time. I’ll miss the tethers when they phase them out. There’s something about the view as you go up one of them that is really mind-bending.”
Kriss snorted. “How was the view falling from one?”
Sorilla laughed. “I was a little too busy trying to kill your dumb ass to really enjoy it.”
Dalton looked at her oddly. “You fell from a space elevator?”
“That bastard—” She jerked her thumb in Kriss’s direction. “—hit the tether car with surface-to-air ordnance while we were moving through the air/space interface. Sucked me right out of the car. I dangled for a bit by a strap, but it inevitably snapped and after that it was a long way down.”
“Shooting with your damn rifle the whole way,” Kriss laughed.
“You two tried to kill each other?”
“Probably more than once,” Sorilla admitted, “but that time was the only time I got a decent image of him that I could later confirm.”
“But you’re working together…?” Dalton looked confused.
“War is hell, but we’re professionals,” Sorilla said with a light shrug. “Today we’re ordered to work together, so we work together.”
“Tomorrow maybe they let us try to kill each other again.” Kriss grinned that terrifying smile. “We can only hope, yes?”
Sorilla rolled her eyes, ignoring the jibe, and turned back to Dalton.
“The Alliance isn’t all that different from humans, frankly,” she said. “The Ghoulies notwithstanding.”
Dalton glanced over sharply as he drove. “Ghoulies?”
“The Ross’El,” Kriss grumbled unhappily. “A blight on the Alliance, and the galaxy.”
“Short grey fuckers with big heads,” Sorilla said. “They have a mastery of gravity that’s unbelievable to see. They also can’t communicate in any meaningful way outside of certain advanced mathematical exchanges. We don’t know if they eat, but they don’t seem to realize that POWs need to, and they respond to pretty much any threat level with the same degree of force. Gravity-induced fission weaponry, or the Gravity Valve. If you had them here, they’d have turned much of the surrounding area into craters by now.”
“Honorless ptahs,” Kriss muttered.
“The Alliance only puts up with them because they’re too powerful to wipe out without collateral damage being truly obscene,” Sorilla said. “They blew up a planet against us once, just to slow down one of our squadrons and keep them from using the gravity of the planet to sling around.”
“In the last war with them, the Alliance lost over fifty inhabited worlds,” Kriss said. “The Ross lost almost as many star systems. Neither of us have recovered.”
Dalton looked sickened at the idea. “That’s insane.”
“That’s the level of play your people are now standing in the middle of,” Sorilla said sharply, her pleasant mask dropping briefly. “Welcome to the galaxy.”
*****
The city was decently sized, Sorilla noted as they drove into the more crowded and narrower streets that wound in around the buildings. There were few building codes, she imagined, and almost no urban planning. Not as big a deal as it might have been, since the work had all been done by computer-driven fabrication units.
The main colony site at Hayden had plenty of room in all directions, so the community there covered hundreds of kilometers in any given compass point from the tether site. Public transport was high speed and integrated into the urban planning for the site, so even several hundred kilometers out was no more than fifteen minutes to the city center.
Here they had opted to build up, with some decent skyscrapers that reached up a pretty impressive height. It wasn’t up to the scales of Dubai or some of the Martian resorts, but for a colony site she was impressed.
“You must have modded your fabricators,” she said as they drove. “The early generation models couldn’t manage more than five stories, last I checked.”
“Early on it was clear that we needed centralized water purification as well as access to food production,” Dalton said casually as he navigated the streets, darting through a hole in traffic before continuing. “So they added some components for extruding carbon-reinforced steel I-beams.”
“Impressive,” Sorilla said. “I don’t think we did that for another few generations. Steel easy to come by here?”
“Yeah, lots of it right on the surface. Meteor iron all over the place, lots of veins waiting to be pulled from the earth.”
Dalton dodged a car that ran a stop sign, shaking his fist out the window as it screamed on past, but otherwise ignored it as they pressed on.
Sorilla had seen worse drivers in her experience, though not by much.
At least there aren’t as many people on the road as in New Delhi after the war, Sorilla supposed. That had been some hair-raising driving.
“It’s probably a good thing we left the APC out of town,” Sorilla admitted. “I don’t want to think about the damage we’d have caused with these idiots bouncing off the armor.”
“One reason I headed you off before you made it into town,” Dalton confirmed.
“One reason?”
Dalton glanced over at her, then away quickly before nodding up ahead. “City Hall up that way. Not too many people there most of the time, other than some paper pushers.”
Sorilla just nodded along, letting the change of subject pass, eyes focusing of a massive old-school cathedral that dwarfed everything around it.
“Nice church,” she said.
Dalton looked over. “Cathedral of the Holy Stars, the colony’s center of worship.”
It was, quite possibly, the most impressive building of its type she’d ever seen. Most of the Earth-based churches had long since moved to far more modern types of buildings. The older, stylized ones still existed, of course, and were meticulously preserved on Earth, but there had been severe limits to the full extent of their original construction.
The Cathedral of the Holy Stars was the product of a culture at, arguably, its apex of technical achievement and with centuries of Earth’s creative history to draw on. She could tell that it had been built by fabricators, at least in part, but most of the tell-tale striations had been smoothed out by hand and the rest artfully hidden behind ornate sculpting of the external wall.
It was the centerpiece of the colony, and a fitting one at that. The steeple was clearly the highest point in the city, towering hundreds of feet over the closest skyscraper and topped by a gleaming white cross that seemed to float in midair.
“It’s very impressive,” she told him. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, not on that scale at least.”
“We are rather proud of it,” Dalton said, smiling as he looked at the Cathedral himself.
“You have reason to be,” Sorilla said. “Short of the Vatican itself, I think it may be the most impressive one I’ve seen. The history of the Vatican City is difficult to match, no matter how beautiful the competition, however.”
Dalton nodded slowly. “I think…I would like to see that, someday.”
“Might be possible,” Sorilla said. “It’ll depend on how things work out between SOLCOM and the Alliance, but I expect some exchange between the Alliance and Hayden at least to begin within the year or so.”
“You’ll let Xenos onto your territory?” Dalton asked, skeptical.
“Whether we’ll let them any deeper than Hayden is still being considered,” Sorilla said, “but Hayden is a known system, so yeah, we’ll at least have exchanges there. Better to talk and deal than to start leaving entire planets and star systems dead and full of rubble.”
Dalton looked skeptical, though of what exactly Sorilla couldn’t tell for sure. She hoped it was just some residual, and understandable, xenophobia rather than a belief that destroyed star systems were better than talking.
So far he seemed like a reasonable sort, but if he was harboring the kind of irrational hate that would ignore the consequences of that sort of warfare, that could not be a good sign for the culture as a whole. It seemed unlikely. She’d never encountered any population that far gone in the past, but she had never dealt with a constructed populace like this either.
“Since you’re interested, this is as good a place as any to pull over,” Dalton said as he pulled the off-road vehicle aside and into a parking slot, only scuffing two other vehicles in the process. Sorilla doubted either owner would notice the new marks; there were enough on them to begin with.
Strickland hopped out of the back as she stepped out of the passenger side and looked around.
“Remind you of anywhere?” he asked, looking around.
“Take your pick of any really old metropolis on Earth,” she said with an amused laugh, eyes on the traffic. “Lousy drivers, optional rules of the road, more bikes than cars, and not a single rig on the road without at least three dents.”
“I was thinking Turkmenistan, myself, but your description covers it decently,” the major admitted.
“Traffic got a lot better in the developed world when autocars took over in the cities,” Sorilla said. “But believe it or not, a lot of the old Eurozone cities were just as bad in their day. Narrow roads, way too many people, and an amusing disregard for the rules of the road. They were built without a mind for the level of traffic they developed, and while they did patch things up in places it could still get pretty wild, especially in small neighborhoods.”
They walked around the front of the rig and were joined by the others, including Kriss and Dalton.
Strickland looked out at the crowded roads, still amused. “You don’t believe in traffic cops here?”
“Not many police officers at all,” Dalton said, “and those we do have tend to work actual crimes, not minor traffic issues.”
Strickland looked around, disbelieving, but Sorilla just chuckled.
“Different strokes, Major, that’s the beauty of the galaxy,” she said. “Just roll with it.”
*****
Grant considered the information he’d heard from the chatting in the vehicle via the transmitter he had on Dalton.
How many times he’d wanted to be there to nudge the conversation, he’d lost count of, but there had been plenty of things to learn just the same. It was hard to believe that Earth had managed to defend their space from what was being described—possibly too hard to believe. That they would then enter into negotiations with the Alliance after that was just frankly disgusting.
Unfortunately, he’d already seen that people were easily led astray. Even his own employer had fallen to the lure of what could be gained from the Xenos, ignoring the risks associated with such exposure.
If that could happen, then there was no doubt in his mind that the filth that had taken over Old Earth would do the same and far more besides. The sickness that had taken over the world before the colony had left had been so pervasive that he would not put any depths of depravity beneath them.
There was nothing he could do to end the Xenos at the moment, and so a longer game would have to be played…no matter how sickening it was.
*****
Sorilla’s implants were working overtime as she scanned the city and its inhabitants around her.
Practically every moving person was listed as a yellow-level threat, at the very least, with several red threats appearing every few seconds just for flavor. Weapons rested on the belts of almost every man, and her hyperspectral analysis picked up explosive accelerants on basically everyone, which told her that if she couldn’t see a gun it was just because the person had likely concealed it. She filed the accelerant signature for her report to the SOL and would let them work out what sort of gunpowder equivalent the locals were using.
She could tell that the other members of her group were picking up the same, even without tying into their implants. Their hands never strayed too far from their sidearms, and even Strickland’s head was on a swivel. They were all used to open carry—many of the places they’d spent their careers were not the sort of places anyone went without a gun—but that didn’t make it any less nerve-wracking to be surrounded by that many armed people with as little backup as they had available.
She didn’t let it reach her face, however, and just smiled pleasantly at Dalton as he gestured to the cathedral and started listing off points of interest. She tuned most of it out, though her implants were keeping a running tally as she examined the people closer than just whether they were armed or not.
The women wore dresses, for the m
ost part. Conservative by many Earth standards, but freer than quite a few as well. Light and airy were the words of the day, which was a sign of practical dress rather than anything traditional. The men wore tans and browns, but mostly classic-cut suits or rougher work clothing. No leather, of course, but otherwise close to what she’d expect in New Mexico, aside from being of a slightly older stylistic choice.
It was a nice city.
She could easily see herself settling in some place like it, if she hadn’t found Hayden first.
And if it wasn’t behind enemy lines, of course.
Of course, one of the main traits that had led Sorilla to her particular career path was that she was able to slip into almost any culture on Earth and embed herself there like a native within a remarkably short time. She didn’t do that by pretending to like the cultures she worked in; she did it by finding the aspects of those cultures that she genuinely enjoyed and identified with and burying herself within them.
There was a lot to like here, but Sorilla could read the signs of deeper problems. There were always deeper problems, of course. She was too well-trained and too experienced in spotting them to have missed them, even in her own home cultures. Perfection was the realm of the Gods. When mortals even attempted it, things would not end well.
*****
The woman was saying all the right things and making the right noises at the right places, but Dalton had a feeling like she was barely paying him any attention at all. He watched as her eyes flicked across the streets, never seeming to stop on anything in particular, never focusing on anything. That might not have bothered him much, but every now and then he thought he caught a glint of light in them that had nothing to do with any reflections.
The others seemed the same, aside from the single Xeno he’d acquiesced to allow to ride with them. He still wasn’t sure how she’d talked him into that, but the squat and powerfully built Xeno was seemingly more at ease than any of the others, which set Dalton’s nerves on edge. No one should be that calm-looking when they were surrounded by, what was to them, xenoforms all armed to the teeth.
