by Tony Daniel
Silence. Crackle of stray radiation interference. KETCH sounded like an angry snake for a moment expressing it. Then the Poet’s voice spoke once more.
“—resistance to capture counterproductive at present. Will attempt to abandon this vessel. If this one apprehended, will attempt evoke immediate execution. Produce ejection. This one discard, discarded. N-space. Find this one. Final key delivery, this one. Rendezvous coordinates. Key to all. Key. Request humans attempt contact. Request, request of you. Key. Rescue this one. Key. Find this one. So much remains. Cannot convey. Attempt—”
Another beep, and the translation cut out.
“God in heaven,” said the XO. “What the fuck?”
Japps checked her readout. “That’s it, XO. The conditioner’s still turned on, but there’s nothing on the carrier.”
The XO hadn’t heard her. She was already in furious conversation with the bridge. After a moment, she stopped talking to what was, to Japps, the empty air, and turned back to face her.
“Sceeve can survive in the vacuum,” Japps said. “Sounds like they’ve thrown him out. Or could be some kind of trick.”
“Captain doesn’t care,” Martinez replied. She put a hand on Japps’s shoulder, smiled a big smile. “He wants you down in ET7. Wants you to requisition a lifepod and go after that motherfucking sceeve poet.”
Holy shit in a can.
“Me? On an extravehicular?”
“You’re the closest thing we’ve got to a sceeve expert aboard this godforsaken craft, Japps. So tag you’re it. Now get your ass in gear, Japps.”
“I-I need—”
But the XO was rushing her to the SIGINT portal.
“Suit up at the pod,” said the XO. “I’ll be sure there’s a tank of heliox waiting for you at the tube entrance in case—well, take it with you. Maybe it’ll be useful to have some sceeve atmosphere along. And, hell, I’ll throw in what we know about their rations. Tank of glucose goo. The pod has grub for you.”
“You talk like I’m not coming back for a while.”
“Oh, you’re coming back. Just taking care of a few contingencies. Now get going.”
This was happening too fast. EV in a lifepod? Japps felt her head spinning. She was an exper-tech, not a spacer. Sure, she’d had the training. All expers had. But to actually do it—
“You know I don’t speak sceeve, ma’am,” Japps said. “Not really.”
“You’re what we’ve got. Anyway, like I said, Japps: captain’s orders. Go!”
Japps shook her head to clear it, turned down the corridor toward the exteriorizing tube banks. Then a thought. The briefest pause. For a moment she gazed at the graphic parameters of the Poet’s message on her display.
“I hate those motherfuckers,” Japps mumbled—to no one in particular. “Every one of them. For what they did.” The XO was already turned back to SIGINT, was back into the chroma, talking to another underling about clearing the lifepod’s launch path.
“Poet’s no different,” she mumbled. “A sceeve is a sceeve.”
But her thoughts made a lie of her words. As Japps headed for Exterior Tube 7, her favorite of the Poet’s outpourings echoed through her mind. She’d gone over it in her frequency analysis many times but until now hadn’t realized she’d committed the lines themselves to memory.
Our sun is dead. The stars blink broken code.
I have traveling to do
away from this endless necessity to feed.
SEVEN
31 December 2075
Dallas
Presidential War Room
“Madame President, the issue is not with the enemy intelligence itself, but the idiotic conclusions that have been drawn. That person, that creep, knows nothing about space or the Extry,” said Tillich. The admiral pointed a finger, seemingly shaking with rage, straight at Leher. “His so-called Xeno Department has filled up with astrologers and phrenologists, to tell the truth. Service malcontents. This sort of thing should be a State Department concern. And, I assure you, the State Department would say that Lieutenant Commander Leher was full of shit!”
Leher stiffened, tugged at his beard. He wished he were back safe in his nest in the New Pentagon instead of here, getting torn a new asshole by a world-expert asshole tearer. But he had a simple job to do and was determined to see it through. That job was to tell the truth.
I’m only the messenger, for Christ’s sake! The weatherman. It’s not like I can control what the frigging sceeve are up to.
As if Tillich understood Leher’s objection to the treatment he was dealing out, the admiral smiled sadly and shook his head with disgust. “Now, now. I don’t want to impute too much intelligence to this young officer’s recommendations. He’s an errand boy for his two masters”—Tillich shifted his pointing finger like a turret gun to Secretary of the Extry Huntley Camaroon and his number two, Chief of Extry Operations Maggie Chen—“who are clearly in bed with the military contractors.”
Tillich was known to despise all contractors at all times.
“These actors have made themselves extensions of companies and individuals whose sole purpose in life is to gouge the American people and the world, and the sooner you recognize that fact, the sooner we can all deal with the current situation and nationalize war production.”
Camaroon and Chen were looking on bemused. Hadn’t the admiral just been chatting them up in the reception room? But these sudden mood changes were known Tillich operating procedure, designed to throw his opponents off.
Tillich continued, full speed. “I won’t call them traitors, no. At least traitors have some commitment, even if it’s to the wrong cause. These two are interested in making themselves and their friends richer no matter what it does to the Extry or to the country.”
“That’s a lie,” said Camaroon, but without a great deal of heat. “And I think you should take it back right now, Admiral Tillich.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Tillich replied. “Deny if you can that you intend to dismantle the only hope for humanity, the Argosy Project, if and when you yank me from my post.”
Argosy was Tillich’s answer to Operation RAMP, SECEX Camaroon’s recently implemented 5,500-craft build-up. Almost half the vessels had been constructed, and more would be made minimally operational within days given the ever-approaching sceeve armada. It was a “small and many” plan that had tripled the number of military vessels in space and allowed stationing of over half the force at various known sceeve invasion routes on the outbound Orion arm. Leher and most senior analysts in CRYPT were fairly certain the sceeve home base was in the vicinity of the star Pollux.
RAMP, even in its early stages, had paid off. It was because of RAMP that the Extry had been in position to eavesdrop on the Poet.
Four days ago, there had been hope that Leher was utterly wrong in Xeno’s Depletion findings, a report widely known to have been authored by Leher. Tillich may have been right. Maybe the sceeve had given up on destroying humans; maybe they would fade away like a bad dream. Argosy, the big ship, defensive model, may then have been the way forward for the U.S. For what was left of humanity.
But then the wake-up call arrived.
Leher had decrypted the Poet’s last message.
The sceeve were coming back in force. This much Leher had predicted in his summer report after he had explained the meaning of the sceeve Special Depletion. The sceeve had temporarily withdrawn to tend to a civil war, or at least to an uprising. That task accomplished, they were now back on track. In the fall, it had seemed inevitable to Leher that Earth would be ravaged once again, and soon. The so-called Fomalhaut Limit, the spherical range in which humanity had previously been permitted to fare without a guaranteed attack, had been contracting for many months.
The sceeve were pressing Solward. With a newly defeated foe and resources left over from the Depletion—a sort of war energy tax—they weren’t going to play nice with humanity this time.
And then, out of the black of space, had arrived the
slender reed of hope in the Poet’s message.
A defecting vessel was headed toward Earth with the game changer of all game changers. It was something called the Kilcher artifact, and the sceeve were very hot to get it back. If humans could acquire this artifact by hook or by crook and figure out how to use it, humanity might have a chance against the sceeve when they invaded once again.
Reinvasion, as far as Leher was concerned, was a given. He’d written as much in the fall.
Even with a wonder weapon, fending off the sceeve would be a long shot, Leher knew. They possessed a massively powerful empire. But at least humanity might have a better chance.
A great deal was admittedly guesswork. But Leher and the Xeno Department had years of experience behind them now. They were an order of magnitude further along in understanding sceeve motivation than they’d been at the time of the withdrawal.
Not everyone had advanced in understanding, however. Some even had a vested interest in not advancing. Leher’s analysis had made him an enemy to an extremely powerful force in Extry command—namely, one Admiral Allen Tillich.
Tillich was nearly 140 years old—a beneficiary of the anti-aging discoveries of the 2020s—and was very good at throwing the weight of his long experience behind his arguments. He had been one of the few leaders with ability and vision in the early days of the Extry, a year after the first wave of the invasion had been absorbed and humanity had begun to dream of fighting back. His demand for “quality control” had made sure that expers didn’t needlessly die from shoddy craft construction before they could even go up against the foe. He was also a constant voice against waste and contractor gouging.
There was no arguing it. Tillich’s system had indeed insured that space travel aboard its crafts was extraordinarily safe and hazard-free.
That is, unless you get attacked, Leher thought. And then your chance of getting blasted out of existence went up to around seventy percent. Extry vessels, especially the smaller, less computationally complex ones without true servants, did not fare well in head-to-head battle with the sceeve.
This was acceptable to Tillich. Eight years ago, the sceeve had withdrawn from the solar system, and he was certain he’d discerned the reason why.
“They’ve taught us the lesson they wanted to teach us,” declared Tillich, “and they only fight when we venture out and provoke them.”
This particular philosophy on sceeve behavior came with its own political party, the Quietists. Tillich had no official affiliation with the movement, but nobody doubted which way his political opinions leaned. President Frost and her team, on the other hand, were Recommitment Party. The Quietists, after eight years of power under former President Taylor, had been turned out by Recommitment in the last election. Tillich had therefore decided to go it alone. After all, he was certain he was right.
He’d come up with Argosy. Instead of a massive buildup in vessel numbers, Tillich wanted a “return to basics.” First, humanity would retreat back into the solar system. Retreat entirely, although perhaps retaining a small force on the Centauri base as an early warning platform. But the most important part of Argosy was Tillich’s proposed VLO fleet. In his conception, the solar system would be protected by a fleet of a few extremely powerful VLO—very large object—vessels that would serve as fortresses to defend a vast sphere around the sun. They were to take positions in a spherical deployment at about the distance of the Kuiper Belt.
Leher had seen some of the drawings for the proposed craft. Behemoths whose top speeds were around 400 c, less than half the Q-limit, what a normal Extry battlecraft could do.
The “Maginot Beach Ball,” Leher had heard SECEX Camaroon call the Argosy Project. Tillich hated the recent multiple-bottle technology. Too complicated, he claimed. Unsafe. Deliberate instigation and breach of the tacit treaty with the sceeve.
And they required servants.
Multibottle vessels were held together by what Tillich called “a misplaced trust in the kindness and best intentions of HAL 9000.”
Tillich loathed servants.
“The Argosy plan is sound. It will be of use to any political position. Now, will you please tell me the real reason I’m being fired, Madame President?” He leaned across the president’s desk and stared directly into her eyes.
Leher saw sympathy—and determination—in President Frost’s expression.
“Admiral Tillich, I was told there was to be an orderly transition in the Extry command,” she said. Her voice was a warm alto—which masked what Leher thought was one of the most coldly strategic intelligences to hold the office. “I’m also sure there is no intention on my part to embarrass or humiliate you. On the contrary, I consider you a hero. Furthermore, you’ve created something unheard of in government: a long-term program that always delivers on its promises and holds to the priorities it sets for itself.”
For a moment, Tillich was stunned to silence.
Don’t see that every day, Leher thought.
Frost had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly the way the old man conceived of himself, Leher was sure.
But then a faint smile crept over the admiral’s face. A bony finger to his chin in consideration.
He’s going to start working it all over again.
Before he could do so, however, Frost continued to speak. She began with a smile that seemed almost self-deprecatory, and Tillich visibly relaxed, sure he was winning another political dominance game.
“But I also can’t forget why I was elected. After the sceeve withdrew, we were battered to hell and stunned, for sure. But then a year passed, and then two, and people in the government, even President Taylor, made it clear that they didn’t believe the sceeve were coming back. He talked to lots of people in high command, and everyone told him this was likely so. Let’s be kind about it and put it down to bad information. We’ve got good information now, Admiral, and whatever interpretation you make of the particulars, the one thing you cannot conclude is that those monsters are going to just go away.” Tillich cleared his throat, made to cut in and make his point, but Frost raised a finger to stop him. “We had eight years where we might have developed some sort of rough space parity with the sceeve if we’d thrown everything we had behind the effort. They had us by thousands of ships, but our best information says it was only thousands, not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. We had a golden opportunity to create a hornet’s nest that screams ‘don’t mess with me,’ and we blew it.”
Frost rapped a fist softly on the table in a gesture of contained force. “The one thing I’m not about to do is blow it again. We’ve had a year of rapid rebuilding with RAMP. All the vessels are based around your safety and engineering standards. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Even with this, we are in a dire position. A grave condition. We still have only a third of the numbers of the sceeve armada, at least according to the estimates I’ve seen, and maybe only a quarter of the raw firepower. If the sceeve attack us, it’s going to be a desperate stand for this nation and this planet. We must find a way to survive. We have to. So while I pray that you’re correct, and that the sceeve will leave us alone if we don’t bother them, I have to prepare for the possibility that they don’t simply want to contain us, but to destroy or enslave us. It’s my duty to fight against such an outcome till my very last breath.”
“Madame, all of that may be true. May. But don’t you see this very act of rapid preparation you’re talking about will be viewed as provocation by the sceeve and—”
Leher steeled himself for another round of Tillich’s argument for quietism. But suddenly a voice from the back of the room spoke up.
“I believe I can provide some enlightenment to the admiral, Madame President, if you will permit me.”
Tillich spun on his heels, stared daggers into the group of civilians and officers behind him. Who had spoken? And, if he were Extry, who had ended his own career?
A hand touched SECEX Camaroon’s shoulder, gently pulled him aside. “Excuse me, sir
.”
Camaroon shuffled aside, and Captain Jim Coalbridge stepped up to face the admiral.
I’ll be damned. It’s Captain Courageous.
Tillich audibly caught his breath. His face reddened. “Captain, I’m afraid I don’t recognize you. Your name, please?”
“James D. Coalbridge, sir. Most recently skipper on PE 95A6er and now on temporary assignment to TACTIC.” Coalbridge looked past the admiral to the president. “Permission to speak, ma’am?”
The president considered for a moment, then gave Coalbridge her nod.
“Traitor,” murmured Tillich.
Coalbridge rounded on Tillich. “No, sir,” Coalbridge said. “That I am not.” He looked the admiral in the eye as he spoke, and this time it was Tillich who nervously glanced away first. “I’ve been out there at the Fomalhaut Limit, Admiral. Only there is no FL, not anymore. The sceeve have been steadily driving us inward. We’ve been forced to retreat time and again down the Orion arm from Sirius, up the arm from Alpha Opiuchi. They’re hemming us in. Just about every line commander I know is sure the enemy is preparing a final blow, once they’ve got us concentrated.”
“Or herding us back what they consider a safe distance,” Tillich put in.
“You’ll pardon me, Admiral, but that is utter bunk,” Coalbridge said. His face reddened. It wasn’t embarrassment, Leher realized, but anger. “I commanded patrol-and-engage craft for the past two years. I’ve fought this war. I’ve lost expers. To my great sorrow, lost most of my crew at one point. I’ve seen the sceeve up close and personal, sir, and I am in agreement with Lieutenant Commander Leher and the Xeno Department on their analysis. Xeno’s Depletion report this past fall put what I’ve observed into perspective, and now this latest information . . . it makes sense.”
Tillich’s scowl became a frown as the hate seeped from his face.
“Do you think I don’t appreciate the sacrifice—”
Coalbridge interrupted.
