Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  “Of course, Madam President,” Verne said, acquiescing to her authority immediately as he nervously scratched the ever-present light brown stubble on his cheeks and chin. “I uh...I apologize.”

  “Accepted.” To MacLeod she said, “Please continue.”

  MacLeod nodded his thanks to her, mimicking the characteristic polite response she often gave to others, secretly pleased that the professor had interrupted him so rudely, thus helping him to appear to be the calmer, more reasonable of the two, which he had little doubt he was anyway. But in deference to his well educated yet clearly misguided opponent, he did decide to alter his choice of words.

  “It is the opinion of those of us who support this resolution,” he began again, glancing briefly at the professor, who seemed sufficiently pacified for the moment by the modification, “that preventing the destruction of the starcruiser Excalibur twenty-two years ago might reverse and ultimately enable us to prevent the recent string of Veshtonn victories from ever occurring, including, most importantly, the one that brought us all together this morning.”

  “I am already aware of your opinion, Mister MacLeod,” the president pointed out. “I’ve been aware of it ever since you interrupted my meeting with the Joint Chiefs to personally hand me a copy of the resolution. What I want to know are the specifics of why you believe this to be the case, and how you intend to go about doing it. But,” she quickly interjected, raising her hand to cut off his reply, “before you start over and possibly waste my time, I have a simple question for you. You’re talking about time-travel. You’re talking about sending someone more than two decades into the past to change our history. Can we actually do that, or haven’t you determined that yet?”

  “Oh, we can do it, ma’am, theoretically at least. Based on all the cultural and historical records the Tor’Kana have shared with us and the rest of the Coalition governments over the years, we’ve known for a long time now that the ancient Tor’Roshans used their Portals to visit their targeted planets and return home while always maintaining what we refer to as ‘time-flow synchronization’. In other words, if Tor’Roshan travelers stepped through a Portal on planet-A and visited planet-Z for three and a half days, then upon their return to planet-A that same three and a half days would have passed there as well. For that to have worked, the actual duration of the travel itself would had to have been extremely short if not instantaneous, despite the incredibly vast distances between the two worlds.

  “Back when our scientists first learned this, they realized immediately that some sort of precise time targeting and adjustment technology must have been built into the Portals. We’ve had research teams studying our particular little wonder ever since we discovered it. I’m sure the professor here can explain the quantum physics involved, if you’re interested. Assuming they’ve learned to manipulate that technology sufficiently enough...”

  “Very well, Mister MacLeod,” she interrupted. “For the sake of this discussion we will assume that we can send someone back in time as you propose. I would like to know why you believe the Excalibur to be the key to solving our problem.”

  “Of course, Madam President. If you’ll allow me summarize for you some of the more significant events that have occurred over the last twenty-two years of our history, I believe you’ll agree that our conclusions make perfect sense.”

  “Mister MacLeod,” she said, somewhat put off by his suggestion, “grasping the concepts of quantum physics may not be one of my strengths, but I’m sure you’re as aware as the rest of the Federation Congress that I was a history major in university, and that as a career civil servant I have always kept up with current events.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am well aware of that.”

  “Then please spare me the history lesson and just get to the point.”

  “Forgive me, Madam President, but I ask that you please indulge the members of the council. They feel,” he pointed out, temporarily separating himself from his subordinate council members, hoping to redirect toward them the impatience that the president was obviously still feeling toward him, “that in order for you to make the most informed decision possible, it’s vitally important that I go over all of the significant events with you in great detail.”

  The president sighed, then said, “Very well, Mister MacLeod. Proceed.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. As I’m sure you will recall, in late June of twenty-one sixty-eight the Excalibur’s battle group was ambushed by a fleet of Veshtonn warships in direct violation of the cease-fire agreement that was in place at that time. Although the escort ships were destroyed, the Excalibur itself, though heavily damaged, survived the initial attack only to be destroyed a few days later after Captain Graves ordered her into the Caldanra star system in an attempt to rescue a Cirran shuttle that had been attacked by the Sulaini. Of course, we didn’t know any of that until many months later when the Excalibur’s wreckage was found.”

  “You are correct, Mister MacLeod. I do recall the Excalibur incident. I recall it quite clearly in fact, and I would appreciate it if you would...”

  “Yes, ma’am. I understand. But take a good look, if you will, at the chain of events that followed. Sometime between that battle and our recovery of the wreckage, the Veshtonn launched a full-scale invasion of both Cirra and Sulain and quickly secured the entire Caldanra star system for themselves. They set up several bases and began a massive strip-mining program that eventually led to their discovery of bolamide. Before long they learned to use that new and very unusual element to build those phantom torpedoes of theirs that our sensors and scanners still can’t detect.

  “Then they sent agents into our system, presumably in a small craft with a bolamide hull because no one ever detected it. Those agents attacked then Vice-President Harkam’s transport when they happened to cross paths with it in interstellar space and the vice-president, his family, and all but one member of the security team were killed as a result.” He glanced very briefly at Hansen and added, “Whether directly or otherwise.” When the admiral showed no outward reaction to the slight, he also added, “That tragic incident nearly cost the admiral here his military career.”

  “I am aware of that, Mister MacLeod,” the president impatiently pointed out, “and I am quite sure Admiral Hansen is also very well aware of it. I for one doubt very much that your insensitive holier than thou attitude...”

  Her voice faded into oblivion as Hansen’s thoughts turned inward and drifted back more than twenty years into the past, to that place where his nightmares had been forcing him to return each night.

  Jonathan Harkam, the Earth Federation’s vice-president at the time, had been invited to say a few words at the opening ceremonies of the new terraforming facility on Tau Ceti-IV. He’d chosen to have his entire family accompany him on the trip, which was certainly nothing new for him, but due to the ongoing war, those responsible for his safety had decided that instead of traveling aboard Solfleet-Two, his official vessel, he and his family would travel in one of the fleet’s heavily armed interstellar transport shuttles. In addition, a team of Solfleet Security Police troops had been hand selected to augment the regular civilian executive security team, and Hansen, then a major with those same Security Police—their unit’s commanding officer in fact—had been appointed to command that team.

  The trip to Tau Ceti-IV was supposed to take roughly twelve days, depending on how often the pilots were forced to make course corrections or take evasive action in order to avoid being struck by arrant bits of jumpspace flotsam. Sure, the transport was heavily armored, but even at relatively slow orbital velocities something as seemingly insignificant as a coin-sized meteor fragment could inflict catastrophic damage if it struck a vessel in exactly the wrong place. At hyper-light velocities through jumpspace a vessel could be destroyed before its crew even had time to scream.

  As he was a man who did not at all enjoy taking long trips, Harkam had chosen to travel in suspended animation and had directed that his family do the same. So, immedi
ately after the transport achieved escape velocity and departed Earth orbit enroute to the nearest jumpstation, the entire Harkam family had been pit on ice...so to speak.

  But they would never make it to their destination.

  About five and a half days into the journey, somewhere deep in interstellar jumpspace, a small Veshtonn vessel that the flight crew hadn’t even seen approaching had attacked and quickly immobilized them. With both jump nacelles and the sub-light fusion engines destroyed and their weapons disabled, they could only arm themselves and wait while that, that thing and its blood-warrior guards cut through the hull and boarded the vessel. The ensuing carnage had been so much worse than mere horror, and the unspeakable savagery that the vice-president’s wife and teenage daughter had endured while the rest of them were forced to watch...

  With a blink of the eyes, Hansen suddenly found himself back in the president’s office, but he still couldn’t purge the grisly images from his mind. Although he’d been right there in the middle of it all—and although he continued to return there in his nightmares each night—he still couldn’t begin to imagine, twenty-two years later, what it must have been like for poor Jonathan Harkam to be forced to watch but helpless to intervene while his family was so brutally and so gruesomely ravaged and slaughtered. But at least the poor man hadn’t lived and been forced to endure the aftermath. With the press always eager to bend the facts and sensationalize a story, that incident had quickly become the most heavily covered news event of its time, and the investigation and congressional hearings that had followed his rescue had been almost enough at the time to make him wish that he’d died in that vessel, in the icy cold of deep space, along with everyone else.

  “Now if you and the other members of your council feel it is so vitally important that I sit here and listen to your historical recitation,” the president was saying, “I will do so. But I will thank you not to color it with your own personal or political comments and opinions. Do I make myself perfectly crystal clear, Mister MacLeod?”

  MacLeod cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am, you do. And I apologize. I didn’t mean to...”

  “I think you certainly did mean to, Mister MacLeod, and I think it most inappropriate and unprofessional of you.”

  “Excuse me, Madam President,” he said defensively, “but I assure you...”

  “So far, Mister MacLeod, you haven’t assured me of anything. Please, just get on with it while I still have the patience to listen.”

  Hansen had no idea what might have happened between the president and the chairman prior to this meeting, but he hadn’t seen her so annoyed with anyone in a very long time. The poor chairman had to have been feeling uneasy as hell.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the chairman yielded, self-consciously adjusting his position in the suddenly uncomfortable chair while wisely biting back several rather off-color retorts that had quickly come to mind. “As I was saying, those same Veshtonn agents—at least we’ve always assumed they were the same agents—then destroyed the Hawking Institute’s lunar orbital platform, effectively blinding Earth to what was going on in roughly half the solar system at any given time. And they escaped undetected. Then, as you know, came the invasion. All our outer system observation platforms, destroyed. The Europan ice-mining and asteroid belt ore mining facilities, likewise all destroyed. All of the Martian and Lunar colonies, either badly damaged or destroyed. Even the Earth itself was nearly overrun.”

  “Mister MacLeod,” the president sighed.

  “And then, Madam President, by the time that first delegation of Coalition representatives surprised us with their unannounced visit, barely a month after we discovered the Excalibur’s wreckage, we as a people were so xenophobic that our government threatened to blow their entire fleet out of space if they didn’t leave our system immediately and never return. In my...” He stopped himself. She wasn’t interested in hearing his opinion. Instead he said, “It’s a miracle we even met with them face to face first, considering the paranoia that our people were suffering from.” That was still just his opinion, of course, but at least he’d been able to disguise it as a fact. He hoped. She had to listen to facts.

  “Mister MacLeod,” the President repeated more sternly.

  Her patience was wearing as thin as rice paper, and the fact that making her angry had proven on more than one occasion to be among the worst career moves a politician could make was common knowledge. MacLeod knew he was treading on dangerous ground, but still he pressed on. He was working himself into quite a state, and his accent was beginning to thicken.

  “Then t’was our turn to go on the offensive. And we showed the bloody Veshtonn just how tough we were, didn’t we! By losin’ to ‘em in the Caldanra system! And four months after that we lost even bigger when they turned ‘round and took Boshtahr away from us!”

  “Mister MacLeod!” the president protested.

  “Those outer Boshtahri worlds were rich in bolamide back then, Madam President. So rich, in fact, that the Veshtonn were eventually able to build themselves a whole bloody fleet o’ their phantom ships and re-invade the solar system without even bein’ detected!”

  “Mister MacLeod, that is enough!” the president finally shouted, slapping an open hand down on her desk. “I am not an elementary school girl! I know my history! Including the fact that we eventually won the Caldanran campaign, and the fact that we still maintain a strong military presence there to this very day! Nothing of what you have said answers my question!”

  She paused to take a deep, calming breath, and then continued. “Now, I want you to give me a straight answer. How might preventing the Excalibur’s destruction twenty-two years ago in turn change what has happened in the here and now?”

  MacLeod took a moment to calm down and collect his thoughts as well, before he got himself thrown out of her office, then answered, “Madam President, those of us who voted for this resolution...” he glanced briefly at Verne again, “...believe that if the Excalibur had not been destroyed, then perhaps the positive diplomatic relationship that we now enjoy with the Cirran government might have begun that much sooner. If it had, then we, rather than the Veshtonn, would have established a dominant presence in the Caldanra system. Under those circumstances we might have been the ones to discover the bolamide and use it to build phantom missiles and torpedoes. The Veshtonn might never have gotten their claws on any of it, and without it they wouldn’t have stood a chance against us. History might then have played itself out in a much more favorable manner. At the very least the Excalibur’s captain would have been able to report the Veshtonn fleet’s violation of the cease-fire agreement to Solfleet Central Command, and that warning might have made a huge difference for us in both the Caldanran and Boshtahri campaigns. It might possibly have even enabled us to prevent the subsequent invasion of our own system.”

  The president could scarcely believe her ears. Was he serious? Was that it? Was that the best he could do? Had she asked Regina to rearrange her entire week’s schedule for this? “If, Mister MacLeod?” she asked. “Perhaps? Might have? Your theory seems to be filled with uncertainties. Are you really asking me to base a decision of this magnitude on little more than conjecture and a few remote possibilities?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You are not doing a very good job of convincing me, and I am quite frankly disappointed in your attempt.”

  “But, Madam President...”

  “Wait just a moment,” she said, a barely raised hand effectively stifling anything more he might have wanted to say.

  She turned her gaze to Professor Verne, who had been nodding his head in time with her somewhat animated response to the chairman’s no doubt politically motivated song and dance as though she had been singing a song. “Professor Verne, even before you spoke out I was well aware, as I already indicated, that you are quite adamantly opposed this course of action,” she said. “What are your specific arguments against it?”

  Verne straightened slightly in his chair and gave his right cheek and his chi
n another nervous scratch. It sounded like sandpaper sliding across coarse wood against the grain. If he were a gambling man, he’d have bet the chairman had something to gain, whether personally, politically, or both, by taking the stand that he was taking. He was, after all, a politician who hadn’t yet ascended to the highest possible peak of his career, and he was known to have some very lofty goals. That made for a formidable and possibly even dangerous opponent. He’d have to be clear, but careful.

  He cleared his throat, then began to deliver the speech that he’d rehearsed over and over again, hoping that it wouldn’t sound nearly as rehearsed as it was. “Ah, Madam President, I admit that it is possible, however unlikely, that traveling into the past and changing the course of history by preventing the Excalibur’s destruction could indeed result in the chain of events that the honorable chairman has outlined. However, such an action on our part could just as likely result in horrific consequences for Earth, and for the entire Coalition as well.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, simply put, ma’am, it is virtually impossible for anyone to predict with any known degree of accuracy how this theoretical time-traveler’s interference with the course of history might affect our world. Each and every little action that he or she takes...”

  “Each and every little action?” MacLeod blurted out, interrupting. “For God sake, Professor, we’re no’ just conducting a harmless physics experiment here! We’re tryin’ to prevent the extinction of every member race o’ the Coalition! We canno’ afford to be concerned with every little detail!”

  “I beg your pardon, Mister Chairman, but it goes far beyond little details,” the professor countered. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that your time-traveler does manage to prevent the Excalibur’s destruction. Let’s even say that galactic history decides to cooperate with you and actually follows the path that you and your colleagues have so ingeniously come up with. No one can possibly predict the subsequent actions of all those people aboard the Excalibur who were meant to die, but whose lives your time-traveler will have saved. Not to mention those of all the others who might be born to them afterwards. Or even those of the millions who were meant to die in the war that followed. What’s to prevent one or more of them from taking some action that will adversely affect our history and put it on an even more catastrophic course than it’s on now, such as leading a violent coup against the Federation government, for example, or assassinating the president?”