Into the Light

by David Weber

  A capital Ormakhel had rebuilt largely using Hegemony-level technology made available to Pakistan free of charge by the Planetary Union Ghilzai excoriated in his near-daily harangues.

  “The truth is that Pakistan’s busy backsliding, and that’s gathering speed,” Dvorak said, lowering his hand from the bridge of his nose to look levelly at his brother-in-law. “Ghilzai’s obviously serious when he says he’s determined ‘to preserve the purity of the Islamic Republic’ by remaining outside the PU and that horrible, corrupting human rights code of ours. That’s his legal right, and nobody here on Bastion disputes it. But he’s also using police state tactics to prevent anyone who wants to leave his Islamic Republic from doing so, and those tactics include ‘disappearing’ dissidents and persecuting—hell, lynching—‘blasphemers.’ Then there’s Sif al-Nabi.”

  “‘Sif al-Nabi’?” Wilson repeated.

  “That’s as close as I can come to pronouncing it. Roughly translated, it means ‘the Prophet’s Sword.’”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “You think?” Dvorak shook his head, his expression disgusted. “It’s a new paramilitary organization with no official connection to either his government or the AJA, but Pat Sullivan’s people know damned well Ghilzai’s subsidizing them and personally directing them. They’re really good at killing people he doesn’t like.”

  “Well shit.” It was Wilson’s turn to shake his head. “Nothing’s ever so bad some asshole can’t make it worse, is it?”

  “Not much,” Dvorak agreed.

  “Does sound like a good ‘what if’ for me to use in a potential training scenario for Cartwright, though. Unless that would be contraindicated for political reasons?”

  “Well, listen to you!” Dvorak laughed. “‘Contraindicated’ from my brother-in-law the Marine?”

  “Allow me to salute you once again,” Wilson said, raising his hand a second time, and Dvorak laughed harder. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t know whether it would be contraindicated or not. Let me think about it. If I can get a few minutes of Judson’s time at tomorrow’s cabinet meeting I’ll ask him about it, too. It probably wouldn’t matter one way or the other, as long as your memo to Cartwright didn’t leak. On the other hand,” he continued thoughtfully, “I can see some possible upsides to making sure it did leak.”

  “My, how Machiavellian of you,” Wilson murmured. Then grinned at his brother-in-law’s expression. “Yes, you heard it here! Two consecutive sentences—well, interrupted by my salute—in which I used multisyllabic words!”

  “And you didn’t drop dead from brain sprain or anything!” Dvorak marveled.

  “Nope, Marines are tough. But you were saying—?”

  “I was saying there’s a limit to the pressure we can exert on Ghilzai, for a lot of reasons. One thing both the President and the Senate are what you might call adamantly opposed to is nation-building through military intervention. There’s probably a majority in the House that would be perfectly happy to do it that way, if it would just get the process over with. Quite a few of our Senators’ countries have experienced that themselves, however, and they’re not really eager to do it to anyone else. And even if they were, Judson’s smart enough to know it won’t work. You can’t build another nation through coercion.”

  “Strange.” Wilson tilted his head. “I seem to recall quite a few instances in which Pieter and Longbow and their friends exerted quite a bit of coercion.”

  “But to individuals, not entire societies, Rob,” Dvorak said very seriously. “The vampires can convince almost any individual to … embrace enlightened self-interest in order to survive, you might say. You can’t do that to an entire societal template. And in this particular instance, the guy at the top certainly appears to be a true believer. He might actually embrace the opportunity to become a martyr, and his denunciation of the vampires as unclean, accursed servants of Satan really resonates with his supporters. As I say, I think his beliefs are sincere, but it’s obvious that he also recognizes the tactical value of demonizing—you should pardon the expression—our most potent ‘special forces’ weapon in the eyes of all Pakistanis.

  “On the other hand, this is a guy who sees military force and terror as standard go-to tools, and who’s probably just as paranoid about us ‘Westerners’—even if we do have an awful lot of Muslim senators helping to formulate PU policy—as he says he is. For that matter, most of our Muslim senators would love for him to have a tragic accident. They hate his version of Islam more than almost anyone else I know, partly because they abhor its repressiveness on a personal level and partly because they know how a regime like his plays to the prejudices of Western bigots who lump every Muslim on the planet together under the label ‘Islamic extremist.’ So I expect he probably does spend the odd hour here or there worrying about a PAF descent on Naya Islamabad. Not much chance we’d actually do it, you understand, but he sure as hell would in our place, which means that wouldn’t keep him from sweating the possibility. So if General Cartwright were to structure a purely hypothetical training exercise around the seizure and neutralization of an unnamed city in the foothills of an unnamed mountain range somewhere in an unnamed country in Southwest Asia and word of that were to find its way to Naya Islamabad.…”

  “Never let it be said that I passed up the opportunity to be helpful to my favorite brother-in-law,” Wilson said virtuously.

  “Just make sure it doesn’t leak unless the President signs off on it!”

  “It won’t.”

  “Good.” Dvorak nodded, then checked the time and pushed up out of his chair.

  “Well, your timing’s good,” he said. “Morgana and Maighread are both coming home for their mom’s birthday. They’re getting in early enough to spend the night, too, and I’m catching the six o’clock shuttle back to Greensboro so I can get home in time to fix supper.” He grimaced. “I spend too many nights right here on Bastion, and Sharon’s been giving me a hard time over it lately. She’s fond of pointing out that for a Starlander at sixty gravities, it’s only about a half-hour flight.”

  “And she thinks you should close up shop for the day thirty minutes earlier—like, I dunno, only an hour or two after everyone else does?—just so you can get home, sleep in your own bed, and relax a little.” Wilson shook his head. “Damn. I knew she was unreasonable, but that—!”

  “All right—all right!” Dvorak waved both hands in the air. “I know. And I really do try. I sort of suspect she got the girls to come home early just so they could bat those big brown eyes at me and make me come home. And Malachi’s home on leave until the end of the week. I’m sure all three of them will be delighted to see you, too. It’ll reassure them that space elves haven’t stolen you after all.”

  “Dave, the twins are twenty-two now and Malachi’s a commissioned officer in eight more months! Well, okay, a third lieutenant’s more of a larva than an actual officer, but the principle’s the same. Somehow I’m pretty sure none of them believe in space elves anymore!”

  “No, and they haven’t seen you in so long that they aren’t sure they believe in Uncle Rob anymore, either,” Dvorak riposted.

  “Ouch.” Wilson shook his head. “Point taken,” he conceded, and Dvorak snorted.

  “Come on. It’s a ten-minute slidewalk to the shuttle terminal, and we have to assemble my security detail.” He grimaced. “They don’t like me wandering around alone, for some reason.”

  . II .

  AURORA, MINNESOTA,

  UNITED STATES

  “No, you’re being shortsighted,” Simon Douglas, the Head of Strategic Planning, said to the meeting of Aurora’s Planning and Development Department—the PDD. “Haven’t you seen the estimates?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen the figures!” Susan Clifford, the head of Zoning Innovation and Historic Preservation said. “But why do we have to build another one so close? We’ve already blotted out most of the original downtown area! If you build this one, too, we might as well j
ust pretend the old Aurora never existed!”

  Mayor Lewis Freymark sighed as he looked surreptitiously at his watch. Clifford was one of those people who always talked in exclamations, regardless of the topic. This time, he understood her frustration, though, and he could see she actually had reason to be upset. The “this one” they were discussing building was the third residential tower in downtown—yes, there really was a downtown now—Aurora. So far, they’d only built “small” ones, with the tallest of them “only” about fifteen hundred feet high. They could have built taller ones … but humans still had an innate distrust of technology, and many people didn’t want to live that high. Whether it was the fear of having a fire, the lift breaking, or “Oh, my God, what if it fell!” he hadn’t been able to get agreement from the PDD on anything taller.

  Even at fifteen hundred feet, though, they were magnificent—each had a hundred or so habitable floors and somewhere around two million square feet of residential area. Nearly eight hundred families inhabited each of the two previous towers, which also had several floors of “local” shops, boutiques, and restaurants. It was hard to believe that only fifteen years ago, he would have killed—literally, killed—to have an infinitesimal fraction of that space to shelter his family. And now they were worried about changing the local character of the town. How times had changed!

  Freymark especially liked the restaurants and would have given his approval for the third tower solely due to the fact it brought more of them to Aurora. Early on in the reconstruction, the engineers in the Invictus and Provocatio space stations had printed in-atmosphere refiners and printers, and—locked in another brutal winter—Aurora had been one of the first cities to get them. It was a dubious distinction, at best, as the refiners could produce nourishing—if not appetizing—food out of all sorts of biological waste materials. While that had been a major factor in reducing worldwide starvation deaths and had gotten Aurora through the winter, eating something you had just flushed a few hours ago took a level of hunger he hoped to never have again. Ever.

  The new, improved hardware which had followed since that first, dreadful winter was considerably more capable, and the engineers had actually considered the human taste bud, which the original refiners … hadn’t. Several people who’d tried their output swore to him that it actually tasted good, but he was prepared to take that on faith without putting it to the test.

  The department head for the Transportation and Mobility Division cleared his throat. “We’ve looked at a number of places for it, but it just makes sense to put it there. Until we can get more of the public transportation network set up, a lot of people will still need to walk to get to work, shop, or get their neural education.”

  “But there’s a historical marker there where John Davidson shot his moose in 1897!” Clifford whined. “That’s an important piece of our history! That’s what made him decide to settle here!”

  “Let’s face it,” Freymark said, getting antsy. “The rest of the mayors and I have talked, and it’s increasingly likely that Aurora’s going to become the new capital of the state. We’ve recovered enough that the state needs one, and Aurora is the furthest along into reconstruction. We have the best shuttle landing area—” the old school on the southeast of town and about two square miles of forest had been leveled for that, over Clifford’s protests “—and the best transportation network. We aren’t centrally located, it’s true, but we also don’t have the tangled mass of scrap that’s in the Twin Cities. We may move the capital back there … sometime … but in the meantime, it’s us. We’ll need to look at where we want to put the facilities for the new state capital at our next meeting.”

  “More construction!” Clifford wailed.

  “Yes, more construction,” Freymark confirmed. “And we need it soonest, too. We’ll also need to enlarge the spaceport again and continue work on the transportation grid.”

  Janice Westfield, the head of the Office of Yes! looked up from her notes with a smile. “So, we are going to call it a spaceport?”

  Freymark nodded. “We are. It’s not like it’s a big reach or anything. Half the Starlanders that touch down at the field go exo-atmospheric on the way here. Calling it a spaceport is forward-looking. Our future is in the stars, and we need to establish a link to them. By being the first to have a no-kidding spaceport, we set ourselves up to service the space industries and keep our town relevant moving forward.”

  “Great!” Westfield was positively beaming now, and Freymark smiled back. Personally, he found the name of her office a bit ironic. He’d inherited the “Office of Yes!”—an import from Detroit—along with his job as mayor when the new city charter was set up. He’d thought it was a silly, chirpy sort of name at the time, especially since its official purpose was “to support the efficient and cost-effective operations of PDD, including management of the Department’s operating budget, grants and contracts; its partnerships with key vendor, foundation and university partners, and its large-scale community communications, meetings and workshops.” In other words, it was the city’s bean counters. Fortunately, Westfield was an enthusiastic and helpful bean counter. Her predecessor hadn’t been.

  “What if we don’t want to be relevant to moving forward?” asked Fred Novack, head of the Citywide Initiatives Division.

  “Then you’re in the wrong business or the wrong city,” Freymark replied, his eyes sweeping down the table to take everyone in. “We stand at a crossroads—not only for Aurora, but for humanity in general—and we need to determine where we’re going to go as a race. I intend for my children to take their children—and our race—to the stars, and I’m going to help them. We need to be ready for the aliens when they return, because they’re going to be ready for us.” He raised a hand when he saw Clifford’s mouth open to complain.

  “I’m not saying we need to completely break from all our history and traditions. Someone once said that those who forget the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them, or something like that, and I don’t want that to happen here.” He nodded to Clifford. “Your marker is an important part of Aurora’s history … however, is it absolutely necessary that it stay precisely where it is now?”

  “What do you mean?” Clifford asked. Freymark could tell from the tone of her voice she was suspicious and sensed a trap—and, based on previous meetings, she was probably right to do so.

  “What I’m asking is if the marker resides exactly where he shot the moose, or is it just in the general vicinity? Did John Davidson mark the precise spot where it happened?”

  “Well … no,” she hedged, seeing where the conversation was going, “but we know it was close to there!”

  “Well, that’s perfect then,” Freymark said as he smiled beatifically. “We can move the marker two blocks to the east to accommodate the new tower, and we can change the wording to ‘Just to the west of this marker…’ That will work perfectly and still allow the construction of the tower. All in favor?” Most of the hands in the room went up.

  “All opposed?” he asked. Clifford’s hand went up, along with the head of the West Design Region, who wanted the tower in her region.

  “Okay,” Freymark said as he spoke over Clifford’s continued objections. “Sorry, I’m late for another appointment, so I can’t continue the debate. The proposal to locate the new tower is approved, and the meeting is adjourned. We’ll meet back here on Monday to discuss the plans for the new Aurora Spaceport and the capital facilities. Good day, everyone!”

  Before anyone could grab him, he stood and strode towards the door, ignoring Clifford’s continued pleas to be heard.

  * * *

  FREYMARK RACED INTO the Aurora Regional Medical Center, asked for directions, and sprinted to the indicated room, looking at his watch the entire way. “I’m not late, am I?” he asked as he burst into the room.

  He drew to an immediate halt, the target of three very disapproving glares.

  “No,” his wife, Janice Freymark, replied with that particular
level of scorn a wife has for a husband who has erred and wasn’t where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be there. “You aren’t late, yet, although you pushed it really closely.”

  “I’m glad you made it,” her daughter Camila Rodriguez added, more prone to forgiveness. She doubled up as a contraction hit her, and her husband, Miguel Rodriguez, took her hand, wincing slightly at the pressure she applied.

  The door opened, and a robot rolled in. “I am sorry to inform you, but the doctor will be a little late,” the robot said.

  “See?” Freymark said, smiling. “I wasn’t late—”

  “She regrets the inconvenience caused by the extra thirty seconds,” the robot added.

  Janice frowned, and Freymark found a nice piece of the floor to look at.

  At almost exactly thirty seconds later, the doctor arrived with another robot in tow. While the first one’s torso had been humanoid in shape, rising from the cylindrical column of its ball-mounted base, this one was large and blocky—it barely fitted through the door—with tracked wheels and a number of appendages. It rolled to the end of the bed and pulled out the stirrups that were an integral part of the bed, then it picked up the leads from Camila’s monitors and plugged them into ports on its side.

  “Hi,” the tall, blond woman who’d followed it through the door said as she washed her hands in the sink and pulled on a set of gloves. She moved like she knew what she was doing and gave off an air of competency. “I’m Doctor Freitag. I’ll be observing the operation today.”

  “Observing?” Freymark asked. “Uh … aren’t we going to the operating room?”

  “Camila would have gone over this with you if you’d been on time,” Janice said, The Tone still present. “The robot is going to handle the operation; the doctor’s here in case of any unforeseen issues.”