Reed studied him. “There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed that, sir. Now . . . well, the Partnership needs justice. The Federation needs to know its true role in this before we can atone.”
“More importantly, we need to get the whole story out quickly, including the Orion plot on Sauria.” He shook his head. “We took a huge gamble with their safety, Malcolm. Risked letting a catastrophe happen so we could play our own spy games. We should’ve revealed what we knew right away. The Sisters’ plan depends on secrecy too.”
“Well, now we can, sir. As soon as we have our warrants for Harris and his people, we can reveal everything.”
Archer turned to gaze out the window at the predawn stars above. “I only pray we can do it in time.”
14
March 8, 2166
Veranith, Sauria
AT LAST, THE RESISTANCE was ready to strike. Mullen and Kelly had managed to wrangle the various Saurian factions into cooperating in the raid on the newly completed spacecraft factory in Veranith—and just in time, for it was days away from starting production on a new wave of ships and weapons. Mullen had been impressed with how helpful Dular Garos had been in reining in the extremism of the Untainted. He wasn’t entirely sure what the Malurian had said to their leaders to win their cooperation, but he was grateful for it. This would be the first major resistance strike against Maltuvis’s machinery of terror, and it was essential that the opposition show a united front.
It had also been necessary to win the Untainted’s support for assistance in smuggling the strike team into Veranith using the back-to-nature sect’s wilderness travel routes, many of which had been kept deliberately hidden from civilized communities and were thus unknown to Maltuvis’s forces. It had been a strenuous journey for the humans, with even Morgan Kelly looking exhausted by the time they reached the city on whose outskirts the factory had been built. But there was little time to rest and regroup. Presider Moxat was determined to destroy the plant before it went online and began churning out more death—and ideally before it was fully occupied by workers, so that casualties would be minimal. After all, most of the labor force would consist of enslaved Veranith.
Thus it was that Mullen and Kelly were crouched behind a boulder on a large hill near the factory, using their handheld scanners to gather intelligence on the plant’s layout, guard postings and movements, and so forth. They also used the magnification settings on their night-vision scopes to supplement the sensor scans. But Mullen couldn’t resist turning his gaze to the dark, quiet city beyond the plant. “Look at it,” he muttered, shaking his head. “When I was here three years ago, this city was vibrant, bright, beautiful. There were firewasps and colored lanterns everywhere, music in the streets, farmer’s markets . . . so full of life and confidence. Now they’re huddled in their homes, keeping their heads down, afraid of what happens next.
“I just don’t understand how people like Maltuvis can be okay with doing this to other people. Making so many millions suffer or die just so he, just one person, can get richer or more powerful. I can’t imagine being that selfish, that greedy. That . . . unfair.”
“He’s a narcissist,” Kelly replied. “Like most dictators. For a narcissist, nobody else really exists as a person. It’s like . . . like being the only player in an immersive simulation game. Everyone you interact with is just a character, so you don’t have to care about them or respect them. They’re just obstacles to overcome or resources to be used to get ahead in the game.”
Mullen pondered that. “Sounds pretty lonely when you put it that way.”
“Don’t waste your sympathy. It’s much worse for the people around them.” She went quiet, but Mullen held his tongue, sensing that the armory officer had more to say. “I had a childhood friend,” she eventually went on, “who was always quiet, nervous, easily spooked. She turned out to have an abusive father.” At Mullen’s startled stare, she shrugged. “Colony world. More stress than you get on Earth, less of a medical or mental-health infrastructure to catch these things. Sometimes it slips through the cracks.
“Anyway, when she finally got help, when she was free of it and able to open up, she talked about what it was like to live every day with an abusive parent—someone who could lash out at any moment, triggered by some random thing. Driven by his own demons, but blaming you for every hurt he inflicted on you. You never knew what he’d do or what would set it off. You didn’t even have a consistent sense of reality, because he’d make up lies and force you to agree with them just as a power game. There was never a moment’s sense of safety or stability, anything to rely on. I finally understood that when I went to war, felt it for myself.”
She paused in thought. “Life for people living under dictators is a lot like that. Like being abused by someone who should be taking care of you. Just imagine—whole nations, whole planets growing up abused. Traumatized. Just because one sick person thinks he’s the only real thing in the universe.” She shook it off. “We have to stop that bastard Maltuvis fast, or a whole generation of Saurian kids will grow up that way.”
“No argument from me,” Mullen said, turning his scope-enhanced gaze back toward the factory. “We have to show him that the Saurian people aren’t his—” He broke off, noticing movement on the edge of the plant. “Trucks.”
Kelly stared. “The people aren’t his trucks?”
“No, look, there are trucks leaving the factory. Big ones.”
The armory officer focused her scope where he pointed. “Got them. Looks like they’re shipping something out of that heavily shielded annex off the main construction hangar.”
“What would they be shipping out?” Mullen wondered. “They’re gearing up to start manufacturing. They should be shipping things in.”
“Whatever it is,” Kelly answered, “it needs some kind of heavy-duty containment, judging from the way those trucks are built. So it’s probably something dangerous.”
Mullen raised his scanner and worked its controls to focus on the trucks, running a full spectroanalysis. “I’m picking up a faint radiation signature . . .”
“Faint is good.”
His blood ran cold when he examined the readings. “Oh, my god.”
“Commander?”
“The type of radiation . . . gamma rays and muons with these energy levels and distribution . . . Morgan, this is an antimatter signature.”
Kelly’s eyes widened. “The total amount of antimatter they should be able to produce on this whole planet in a year would fit into a single one of those trucks. I count five. From just one factory.”
“They’ve got a starship-grade antimatter generator in there. They have to.”
The lieutenant grabbed his arm. “Even if they got the specs from the Orions, there’s no telling how unstable it could be. If we go in there tonight and try to blow things up . . .”
Mullen cursed. “We have to get back to the team now.”
U.S.S. Essex
“It’s good to hear your voice at last, Commander,” said Bryce Shumar, who had been quietly going stir-crazy along with the rest of his crew over these past three weeks—though strictly on the inside in his case. The tradition of the stiff upper lip still served him well. “But isn’t it risky to use the power to contact us at this range?”
“It’s a risk we need to take, Captain,” Mullen said, proceeding to fill Shumar in on the discovery of the antimatter generator at the factory. “Naturally we’ve aborted the raid.”
“Of course. One containment breach and the whole city would be lost.”
“Sir, that’s likely to happen sooner or later even if we don’t intervene. That’s why it’s necessary to break our silence. Presider Moxat has recorded an announcement to the Saurian people—we need Essex to transmit it planetwide. We have protocols that will get it past the automatic content blockers on the global information network, but we also need to beam it to every open receiver, make sure the word gets out. We need you to cover one hemisphere while we cover the other fr
om the shuttlepod on an orbit antipodal to yours.”
“You’ll have to be in low orbit for that,” Shumar said. “You’ll be very exposed.”
“It’s a risk, sir, but the word has to get out. Hopefully the announcement itself will change things pretty quickly.”
Shumar only needed a moment to decide. “Very well. Transmit the presider’s speech to Mister Avila. Ensign Moy, break orbit, take us into optimum electromagnetic broadcast range of Sauria. Mahendra, ready shields and hull plating and charge weapons—those blockade ships will be going after both us and the shuttle.”
The bridge crew gave their assents one by one, save Miguel Avila, who was already receiving the upload from the shuttlepod. Shumar stepped back to the situation table. “Relay the message here, Miguel. Let’s hear it.”
Presider Moxat’s wizened face appeared on the tabletop screen. “People of Sauria—Lyaksti’kton, N’Ragolar, whatever name you give our home. I am Moxat, Presider-in-exile of the Global League, and currently head of the resistance to the tyranny of Basileus Maltuvis of M’Tezir.” Shumar noted that she refused to acknowledge his self-proclaimed status as monarch of the Maltuvian Empire. “I speak to you now because our movement has discovered something horrifying about the Basileus’s actions and plans, pertaining to the shipbuilding plants he has had constructed with slave labor in several occupied countries. This discovery was made with the assistance of the United Federation of Planets’ Starfleet, and I am transmitting their data to you now as proof of these revelations.”
Moxat went on to lay out the evidence for the antimatter generators, then continued: “As many of you know, our people have made only the most limited progress in manufacturing antimatter. Most of the antimatter that Maltuvis uses to spark the fusion reaction in his warships is harvested from the sparse natural supply of antiparticles captured by our planet’s magnetic field in its radiation belts. To go from those bare beginnings to the industrial-level antideuterium production now revealed to be occurring in the Veranith plant, and possibly in others, would be impossible in the short amount of time since Federation contact. Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that Maltuvis—he who has based his rise to power on the claim that he is the protector of our world from alien domination—must himself be in collusion with alien allies. Only they could have provided him with the technology to manufacture antimatter—indeed, as we now must recognize, the technology to produce such a large fleet of warships so swiftly. Far from protecting us from alien conquest, Maltuvis has had alien help in his own conquest.
“And far from keeping the people safe, Maltuvis in his greed for power has directly endangered us by the hundreds of millions. These antimatter generators create a profound risk. Should one of them sustain a malfunction or a breach, the explosion could destroy the entire adjacent city and devastate the ecology of much of a country. Our resistance had intended to sabotage the Veranith plant in order to slow Maltuvis’s conquest . . . but we cancelled our attack when we learned of the profound danger. We are grateful to our Federation advisors for saving us from a terrible mistake. And now we pay their kindness forward by warning you, the people of this beautiful world, of the depraved indifference that Basileus Maltuvis has shown for your safety, and the profound hypocrisy that underlies his self-created image as the defender of our people.”
Strong words, thought Shumar. But they were words the people of Sauria needed to hear. It would be his privilege to ensure that they were heard.
March 9, 2166
Akleyro, Sauria
In the two days it had taken Charles Tucker to track down some of Antonio Ruiz’s resistance contacts and recruit their aid in returning him to Akleyro, he had struggled with his decision to assassinate Garos. In his years with Section 31, and even before then in Starfleet, he had occasionally been ordered to take actions that would bring about the death of others. But it had usually been in the heat of battle, as it had been with the engineers aboard the Saurian ship, or in indirect ways that kept Tucker a step or two away from the actual killers, as it had been when Devna had killed the guards to free him and Ruiz. And it had almost always been under someone else’s orders. Deciding on his own to commit a premeditated murder was a much heavier cross to bear. The bitter irony was that it was his desire to escape the immorality of the spy game that had led him to this point.
Yet he could see no alternative. Garos’s plan to blow up the Veranith plant’s antimatter generator would kill millions. Ruiz had understood that, and had given his life so that Tucker could survive and prevent it. If a life as noble as Ruiz’s was an acceptable sacrifice to save those millions, then Tucker had no business feeling qualms about ending the life of Garos, a crime lord with the blood of thousands on his hands already. He had to terminate Garos with extreme prejudice, or Tony’s sacrifice would have meant nothing.
And if he never got a good night’s sleep again, it was still a price worth paying.
So it was that Charles Tucker returned to Akleyro, his mind focused, his emotions dammed in, his will directed by the overriding goal to prevent the disastrous raid on Veranith by any means necessary.
He was therefore completely staggered to discover that the raid had been called off while he had been crammed inside a shipping crate on a riverboat.
It was surreal. Through no action of his own, apparently through sheer luck, the Essex team had stumbled upon the same intelligence he and Ruiz had found, because Maltuvis’s forces had unwisely shipped out some of their antideuterium while the recon team had been on hand. The starship had helped beam the message all over Sauria, exposing Maltuvis’s lies and hypocrisy. Naturally the dictator was denying the accusations of alien collusion, insisting that it was M’Tezir brilliance alone that had achieved the antimatter breakthrough, but there was nothing he could do to explain away his sheer recklessness in manufacturing and stockpiling antimatter adjacent to populated cities. His credibility had taken a massive hit, and the resistance had scored a major victory without firing a shot. More significantly for Tucker’s mission, the abandonment of the raid, and Presider Moxat’s pointed praise of Starfleet’s aid in preventing a catastrophe, meant that the Sisters’ plan to discredit Starfleet had failed without Tucker needing to lift a finger. All the killing, all the sacrifice, had been for nothing.
Tony Ruiz had not needed to die.
Tucker was still in shock when Devna, who had clearly had an easier time returning to Akleyro, found him and led him to Garos. “Ah, Mister Tucker,” the Malurian greeted him cheerfully. “I’m impressed that you managed to survive in spite of everything. Well played, sir.”
This was the man who had betrayed him and Ruiz and turned them over to Maltuvis for torture and execution. It was partly his fault that Ruiz was dead. But any rage Tucker felt was swamped by his confusion. “Why didn’t you stop this?” he asked the Malurian. “You were working for the Sisters. You wanted the raid to happen. Why didn’t you keep Starfleet from finding out about the antimatter?”
Garos chuckled, shaking his head. “I’m afraid you’re still a few moves behind. I arranged for them to find out.”
Tucker could only stare. “What?”
Devna stepped forward. “I wasn’t defying Garos when I came to M’Tezir to rescue you. Rather, I persuaded him to attempt an alternate plan. I went to Maltuvis posing as a messenger from Harrad-Sar. We slave women all look alike to him. I relayed instructions, supposedly from Harrad-Sar, to ship out a quantity of the plant’s antimatter reserve before the day of the raid. After all, there was more than enough remaining antimatter and other explosive materials at the factory to devastate the city without letting the entire supply go to waste. Maltuvis was quite happy to salvage some of the antimatter he hopes to use to propel his conquest of the stars, once I assured him that Garos would arrange for the raiders’ recon party to be absent at the time scheduled for the move.”
“And instead,” Garos said, “I simply did the reverse, ensuring that Commander Mullen’s team would be present when the
antimatter was moved. Thus the truth was exposed, the day was saved, and so on.”
Tucker was still at sea. “I don’t get it. You said the Sisters were forcing you to cooperate. That they threatened your family.”
Garos glared at him as if he were a slow-witted child. “Yes, which is why I couldn’t go along with your plan without exposing myself and getting my mate and her other husbands killed. I had to betray you before you ruined everything. But Devna’s plan had the advantage of keeping me out of it.”
“By attributing the order to Harrad-Sar,” Devna added, “we will make it look as though he was running a side operation to smuggle out some of the antimatter for himself, and that it was his own greed that led to the exposure of the generators and scuttled the Sisters’ plans.” She gave a slight, sad smile. “It was easy to persuade his actual slave women in Maltuvis’s palace to corroborate my story. They’re as happy to get rid of him as we are. He hasn’t treated them well.”
“One more reason I’m happy to see him suffer,” Garos said. “Nothing is as depraved as disrespecting females.”
“Nice to see you have some standards,” Tucker riposted, though it was halfhearted.
“I’m not a monster, Mister Tucker. I do what I’m forced to do for the good of my family and my people. I was never comfortable with the idea of killing millions of Saurians to achieve that end. I wanted to find a way I could spare them without endangering my family. You didn’t offer one. Devna did. And I’m grateful to her for that.”
Tucker was dumbstruck. He’d profoundly misjudged Garos. More—he’d misjudged the whole situation. He’d believed that acting alone and in secret was the only way to prevail, but it had been a simple act of openness and truth that had foiled both the Sisters and Maltuvis. He’d settled on Garos as a target that needed to be destroyed to achieve the mission, yet Garos had been the one whose actions had saved countless lives. Tony Ruiz had tried to talk him into taking the better path, the more open path, but Tucker had convinced him that deceit, intrigue, and violence were the sole, necessary path toward the greater good, and in so doing, he had led Tony to a completely unnecessary death.
Rise of the Federation Page 23
