by Jim Rudnick
Yet he shook his head and said plainly so they’d hear him once and for all, “Gentlemen—I’m a navy captain. Not a politician at all. And my father is still prime minister of Amasis, end of story.”
They all nodded.
The deputy spoke up. “And it’s exactly that that brings us here today, Captain. We want your father to remain as the prime minister—and the only way to protect him, to keep his job for him, would be for you to hold it for him. As we said, and you know that we’re in power, we would simply appoint you as the temporary prime minister with the express proviso that as your dad gets rehab and therapy and slowly comes back to full recovery. No one would ever try to get him out of the position with his eldest son holding it for him. You’d follow our lead, do the normal chores of the office, and then soon, your dad will come back to help by doing a few, then a few more, ‘til he takes back over. We’ve thought this through, and this is the best thing that could happen, Captain. Won’t you reconsider, please?”
And he did just that. Over the next hour, he asked many more questions. And there were many answers.
He still had the nagging feeling that his father would not make a full recovery, but like his family, he thought there was a chance. How better to honor that chance than to help keep his dad’s job alive and ready for him to take back over.
More than an hour later, he agreed, and that led to them all agreeing on more meetings and him asking the family for their permission to do just this—though he knew it was only a formality for him.
He also, as he walked back down the hallway toward his dad’s room, would now have to let the admiral know he needed some time off. Like a sabbatical sort of maybe … no idea what to call this request… He’d EYES ONLY the admiral tomorrow once the plan was accepted by his family.
#####
Xeno team leader Reynolds was not impressed.
“What a xeno team does—wait, pardon—what a Xenoarchaeology team does is to study the past … the history of an alien race. And that has only a minor interest in some of their societal items like weapons. At least that’s what they drilled into me back in grad school as the appropriate response—but the hell with them—let’s get down there,” he said as he talked mostly to himself as he and three other team members left the bridge area and made their way toward the aft down walkway number one.
That name, like many others, had been given to parts of the alien shipwreck because it was easiest to use terms they all knew and could refer to as simply as possible. They were a long way from the aft and walkway number nineteen, where they then needed to move to the starboard side and the large entrances to the ship’s cargo bay area.
They walked and talked and argued as any xeno team would about items they’d found and as yet had not positively identified and put into the xeno database and then moved on to other items.
“That pastel blue rod—with the three flexible orange film leaves coming off? Has anyone yet found even a hypothetical rationale for that one?” Professor Irving asked.
“Positively, Ellen,” said Beedles as they walked one in front of each other on the walkway. “It’s obviously a grooming tool—we found it in the perch-slash-rest-slash-bedroom area we’re calling it, hung up on pegs, one per perch. That would indicate that these tools were personal property of each of the perch residents—and what else would be so personal other than some kind of a grooming tool. Maybe,” he said half facetiously, “it was used to comb their wattles—if they had wattles.”
That got a snort from Reynolds who followed up in the rear, and they continued to talk about other items found and what they, so far, were thinking they might be used for or not.
“In that light, is it not also odd to anyone else that as yet we’ve not found any kind of photos of these aliens? Shots of home and family kind of photos? Not a one—yet,” Reynolds said as they continued to walk.
At the final walkway crossing, they left walkway number one and then took walkway number nineteen to the starboard side of the ship. It took ten minutes more of purposeful walking and talking to get to the wall ahead and the bank of doors.
Some were closed and they’d as yet not tried to open any, but they noted the circle icon in both the floor and the coved crown molding too. They started at the far end and opened them one by one. In the second one that they had opened, it had led to smaller interior rooms again, only able to be opened by the linking of the two circle icons. The first held items they didn’t yet understand well enough to voice an opinion as to what they were. There was more than enough time to slowly learn and hypothesize later.
The second now open doorway led to a series of tall pegboard sliding walls, each with at least what looked like different kinds of weapons—hand guns but for strange hands, longer guns if that’s what they were too. Some items looked like they might have become a weapon when thrown or dropped. No one had any kind of an idea, but the fact that there were the same number—thirty-one of each—was interesting, Professor Irving thought.
“Thirty-one is the number of each of these weapons—if they’re weapons, I mean. But the thirty-one is very interesting. We might have used say twenty-four or twenty using base 10 math. But these aliens chose thirty-one of each … that needs some thinking on too, I believe.”
And the others nodded too—when a set of items is always shown as being the same numerically, that meant there may be some kind of other normality as was evidenced by same.
While Reynolds and Irving sat on the floor, Professor Beedles, whose area of expertise was artifacts, wandered the aisles of pegboards, looking and taking more photos, and then he stopped and called out, “Hey, come see this.”
The seated professors rose quickly and made their way over nine of the aisles until they found Professor Beedles standing and looking down at something on the floor. Or almost on the floor.
As they came up even with him about halfway down the aisle, they stopped at what they saw.
In front of them was some kind of a device—a weapon or perhaps something similar to same—and it floated in the air about two feet above the deck itself. It appeared to be on in that there was an amber light, positioned just above what might have been a handhold if you had a hand a foot long. It was more than eighteen inches in length, made of some kind of shiny metal or plastic, and it hovered above the floor. It did not dip or move at all, not even when Professor Irving got down on all fours and blew air at it either.
She looked up at the others and then said, “I’m going to try to touch it—just touch it with a forefinger,” and she did just that.
But about two feet short of the device itself, her hand stopped getting closer, as her finger bent back, and she grunted a bit as she could push no closer.
She then folded her finger back with the others and tried to use her whole hand to reach and touch the device and was stopped again.
“It’s like there is a solid—firm, not cold but room temperature—field around the device. I’d call it a force field as we have those ourselves, but this one has little color—I see a hint of green perhaps? You?” she asked.
“Green but like an olive green to me,” Reynolds said as well as adding, “but be careful, Ellen.”
She nodded and then slowly ran her hand over the field that lay around the device. Her hand sculpted a circular area, about two feet away from the device, but at the floor she could not get below the device as the field hit the floor and seemed to be stuck there.
“About two feet all around the device is as you can see, as close as I can get. But what’s even more of an issue is—I take it that you didn’t do this, Ned?” she asked.
“Not my doing. I came down the aisle to the left, turned and then saw this thing, sitting there. All I did was get closer, but I did not start this—nor for that matter did I hear or see nor in any way have a way to know how this was done. In fact, that device could have been floating there in that force field for, what, twenty thousand years, perhaps.”
He shook his head at that hypothes
is, in that it was certainly plausible but just not possible in his mind.
He looked up at the matching units still on the wall of pegboard and counted.
“There’s thirty of these same devices still up on the wall—of course. And as I’m not the adventurous type, I’d say all one needs to do is to simply grab one and take it down off the wall. That’d tell us much,” he said.
Ellen straightened and before anyone could even say anything, she simply took one in her hand by the large silver shank along the length of the unit and pulled it down. It sat in her hands, doing nothing. She slowly turned it over and over again, and it was a simple inert device.
“Not surprisingly, you’d be the one to test this, Ellen,” Reynolds said, and he held out his hand to look at it himself.
Carefully, she passed it over to him, and he took it and like her, slowly turned it over and around.
“Metal, I’d say, by the heft. About sixteen inches in length, about four wide at the one end, two at the other, and the central shaft is about an inch wide—circular in shape. There are five—no, six—small LED lights, I’d say, along the bottom edge of the four-inch square end, and none are currently lit up. I think that’s enough for now too,” he said as he gently replaced it back up on the wall pegboard, ensuring that it was secure.
The three of them looked at the unit and then down at the one that floated above the floor.
“No way for us to actually touch the one down there, so it’s gonna stay on, and we’d better record that for the team,” Reynolds said.
Beedles took more pictures and forwarded them all including the vid of their handling of one of these devices to the xeno database, and they all grinned at themselves.
“No bombs went off—no one lost a hand, so I’d say it’s been a good day,” Beedles said, and that got a wider smile from them all.
“Now, let’s try the next aisle …”
CHAPTER TEN
It had occurred to her that her new son-in-law had been a real find for the Barony.
Then she remembered he was only going to be a step-son-in-law and he’d been a closet drunk for years. She also remembered he’d found and stopped her pirates years back and the Barony treasury had been hurt by that too. Many reasons to think her admiral was not the find of the century—but then again, she weighed up the pluses on his side, and while they all sprung from Ghayth, there was no doubt. Admiral Scott was a find well worth the keeping for her realm.
Not to forget, but her stepdaughter, the Lady St. August, was the one who’d really found the admiral and had somehow fallen in love with him too. As the Baroness, her task was to further the Barony in all things. The fact that she’d only barely pushed the lady and the admiral together a few times was not lost on her. She knew there might have been a chance the two of them might have hit it off—but only the counsel of the Master Adept had shown her that.
The Issians and the Barony … two allies she knew were a match that could mean much for her realm—and for her as well.
So far, the single factor that had been the unknown was the planet Ghayth. A wet, gray, and rainy world, and one she really didn’t even like visiting. Of course, with the new Barony Drive, one could be there in the morning and home for lunch instead of wasting weeks and weeks in boring FTL travel.
That got her brain to thinking on the Barony Drive itself, and as she noodled that around in her head, she looked out of the windows here in the hallway leading to the council chambers. She wondered if the launching of the Barony Drive to the RIM Confederacy today was still the best method to aid the Barony. Our treasury wont be happy right away, she thought, but the new instant travel that this would open up was the real prize for us.
She had thought long and hard and often on this. She had worked out even on paper with lists and everything that the pluses were much larger than any minuses that might occur. She had slept on this and also put it out of her mind for a week at a time, trying to get a real sense if this was going to work. It would work was the answer she continually came back to, over and over.
The Barony Drive would change the RIM for sure—but then moving inward, it would change the galaxy.
She had a couple of nagging little anxious doubts that she did have. It wasn’t our technology but found technology was the big one. That it was simple and worked was a real plus—but what happened if it suddenly did not work was the real question. One that she’d had the Barony legal department working on for over six months, and there was a way to protect the Barony all right. And as all ships had their original Tachyon Drives available via their Perseus engines, backups were fine too.
She looked out again at the scene below Navy Hall, and the bright sunlight diffused by the filters in the glass was still so pleasant to look out over. Green grass, small gardens but so simple and un-adorned compared to her own one shouldn’t even call them gardens lay in front of the building. There were long park benches too, so one could sit and enjoy the small parks off to either side of Navy Hall, yet as always, she noted, they were empty. Not a single Junoite sat and did their park visits at all. She did wonder at that, and then she remembered bureaucrats seldom had free time—at least on Neres, so maybe the benches were not filled during working hours but only at lunchtime or after work.
She didn’t dwell on that for long as she saw a robo-bus coming in from the landing field just opposite the building. Out from same came many members of the Confederacy Council. There was the chairman, which was odd as he was usually late, the Duke d’Avigdor and the Doge of Conclusion were in conversation with the Novertag premier and more heads of state too. There was another bus coming up behind and still two more too, so the council chamber would soon be full, and the meeting would start on time at least.
She rose, walked down the last few strides to the council chamber, entered, went right up to the head of the table, and took her seat just to the right of the chairman’s place. As the vice chair, she did have some say in some things, and she had been able to, over the past few years, get some real design changes done in the room. Along the one wall, above the refreshment tables that held the catering items like drinks and food items, she’d gotten the clerks to allow items to be put up on shelves from around the RIM. There were real fossils of a trilobite creature from Hope. There was a set of matched horns from the huge oved creatures from Anulet, which were bigger than elk horns. From DenKoss, a series of fish skeletons showed the change in size of some kind of prized food with each just about to eat the one in front of it. She had thought it a bit odd that this kind of eat or be eaten sculpture was here in the council chamber, but then she’d remembered the same rule worked for realms too.
As she retrieved a bottle of water, she had a moment to turn to watch the DenKoss members all get set on their tank chairs at the table, and she wondered for a moment if the Barony Drive would work under water. Then she grinned as she remembered that while their ships were full of water, the exterior was cold space, and that’s what the Barony Drive used.
She went back to sit, and as she did, a big flood of Confederacy members came into the chamber, and all gathered around getting a drink or something similar. She realized Admiral McQueen was not at his normal place, just behind her and to the left. As she glanced out of the huge still open doorway to the hall beyond, she saw him talking to both the Leudie member and the Faraway member. He looked like he was reading them the riot act as he was pointing a finger at each of them in turn, and while she couldn’t hear him, she did think he might have been pointing out that council security was AI run. There would be no mistakes allowed, she knew, and if that was his message, the two members stood and took it all in, not saying a word.
As the admiral finished, he turned on his heel, walked into the chamber, passed by her, and sat in his place in the first of the tiered rows behind the council table.
She half-spun to catch his eye and then nodded. She clicked on her tablet to Ansible him the pre-written message, and she watched as he got the chime, accepted her note,
read it, and then looked up at her, his face a question. She shook her head—she would not explain now but would after the meeting as her note instructed, so he nodded back to her.
Okay, one of my ducks is in a row, she thought, now to others.
The chairman finally got to his seat, five arms holding his usual batch of files, folders and tablets, and his sixth arm balanced a cup of something with a pastry sitting on top of the cup. She watched as he unloaded the files and meeting paraphernalia onto the tabletop and then carefully set down the cup and placed what looked like a prune Danish onto an extra coaster that was at his place setting.
She, like the rest of the council, waited some more long minutes, and eventually after finishing off that Danish, the chairman called the meeting to order. Clerks read the Agenda and the two regrets—both of the Duos worlds had sent in their can’t attend notes with no explanation. That did make her wonder, but she knew this meeting would be the one not to miss. So too bad for them.
She listened to the various items right up to Agenda item number seven, which was a presentation by the Faraway member realm.
She knew what that was, of course, as their ultimatum—adjudicate their claims or they’re gone—as they’d presented same to the executive committee just a few weeks back. She also knew that right after their presentation, the Leudies were going to do the same thing at Agenda item number eight. Her presentation was Agenda item number nine.
Minister Gibson, the Faraway representative at the table today, rose to speak. He looked around the table first, she noted, trying to catch every single eye at the table, and she dipped her head at him when he looked at her in turn.
