Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Lyokh tried to digest that. He was in unfamiliar waters here, so he trusted the woman to find a course and guide him along it. “All right. Sound bites. Tell me how to do that.”

  “Try to rehearse a few good quotes that you’ve thought up ahead of time. If you can’t think of any, I can give you some. It helps to be succinct, it works well with people with low attention spans.”

  Lyokh nodded. “Okay.”

  “It helps to have statements prepared for some questions, too. For example, if someone asks what it is you hope to accomplish in a given military campaign, you’ll say…?”

  Lyokh took his cue. “To neutralize an enemy and get as few of my people killed as in the process.”

  Dolstoy wiggled her head. “Too cold and bloody. I was thinking something more like, ‘We are motivated at this time to keep exploring X System because of the pristine nature of the Stranger sites located here. Senator Kalder asked for a legion that is tough and motivated, and he came to the right place.’ If you are asked on your feelings about parts of the military’s dwindling resources being siphoned to help with what some view as a pipe dream, you might say, ‘The military has always supported fact-finding missions, and has a long tradition of working with government and civilian groups to find information that might be of tactical importance.’ See how I kept it simple, and on point? And you’ll note I avoided all technical jargon and mentionings of killing people.”

  Lyokh nodded. “I think I see.”

  “Most interviews are less than four minutes, because most people’s attention spans are limited. They’ve got shit to do, just like you and me. So we give it to them in easily digestible bits.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Let’s do some roleplaying.” She scooped up a chair and sat across from him, cross-legged, her hands cupped neatly on her lap. “I’ll be the interviewer, and we’ll do a dry run. Captain Lyokh, thank you so much for joining us today.”

  Lyokh shrugged. “Thanks for having me.”

  “Don’t shrug. The only motion you should make is smiling.”

  Lyokh sighed heavily.

  “And don’t sigh at all.”

  He almost sighed again, but maintained control, sat up straight, and forced a smile.

  Dolstoy pursed her lips. “Good enough. Now, first off, Captain, tell our viewers how you came to be a part of the Crusade.”

  Lyokh started to talk, licked his lips, and froze. Even though there weren’t any cameras on him, the woman’s eyes were on him, and somehow that represented the cameras he knew would someday be watching. It was somehow worse than facing the Visquain and telling them what all went right and wrong with an operation. Her look was more critical, like she was sifting for deception in him, which she probably was. Also, she had taken him off-guard by finding problems with his shrugging and sighing. It was like being spoken down to by an uppity sister.

  Finally, he said, “I, uh…I was ordered to be part of the Crusade—”

  “Don’t make it sound like a chore.”

  “But it is a chore.”

  Dolstoy smiled briefly, a flash of an annoyance breaking through the mask. “Say this instead. ‘Senator Holace Kalder was actually the one who brought it to my attention. I was in the middle of wrapping up the Phanes campaign when I received the message that the senator had taken a look at my service record. He determined I would be right for the job. The senator suggested my name to the Committee on the Continued Crusade, and the rest is pretty much history.’ Then tack on a smile. Try it.”

  Lyokh tried to recall everything she had just said, and before he could stop himself, he prepared himself with a sigh.

  “Don’t sigh,” she said.

  “Right.” He cleared his throat. “Senator Kalder—”

  “Holace Kalder,” she put in. “Say his whole name the first time you mention him, then just Kalder for the rest of the interview.”

  “Right. Senator Holace Kalder brought the Crusade to my attention. I was in the middle of the Phanes campaign…so was unaware of its nature?” He said it like a question, looking to see if Dolstoy would stop him. She just smiled, so he continued. “I received a message during that time that said the senator was looking for someone to help lead the Crusade’s ground forces.” Improvising now, working with the gist of what Dolstoy had said. “Apparently, he determined I was the right man for the job—”

  “Don’t say apparently.”

  “—He determined I was the right man for the job, and after he suggested my name to the Committee on the Continued Crusade, the rest became history.” Lyokh looked at her, then put on a smile.

  “That is the most inauthentic and uncomfortable smile I’ve ever seen,” Dolstoy said. “But it’s a start. Let’s review that a few times.”

  “Review it?”

  “Let’s go over it again. Just like a martial arts move or a tactical deployment, you train it again and again until you can nail it right every time. From the top. Captain Lyokh, tell our viewers how you came to be with the Crusade in the first place.”

  They went over it a dozen times before they moved on to the next question, which concerned what it was he hoped to accomplish with the Crusade, whether or not he believed in it himself, and what he thought of Kalder as a man. To Lyokh’s surprise, the rehearsal forced him to ask himself these questions, as well. So far, he had been going along out of habit—Forward until there is no more forward—but he hadn’t actually stopped to ask himself if he truly believed in what Kalder was doing with the Crusade, the whole business with the Strangers having ancient answers. Certainly, the idea of scraping every corner of the galaxy for signs of the Strangers sounded interesting, but would it come to any avail? Would humanity be better off for it?

  “Will humanity as a whole be better off after this Crusade ends?” asked Dolstoy.

  “I believe so, yes,” Lyokh said, not because he was certain of it, but because he thought it was the right thing to say.

  But Dolstoy was already shaking her head. “That was a trick question. Answering it means you have an end in mind. If my follow-up question was, ‘So, you do admit that the Crusade has an endpoint? When is that?’, then what would you say?”

  Lyokh just stared at her. He didn’t know what to say.

  “So what should I have said instead?”

  Dolstoy opened up her hands to offer the logic of it. “Toss the question back at them, using phrases that begin with, ‘Let me put that another way,’ or ‘The important thing to remember is,’ or ‘The real question here is,’ and then fill in the rest with the answer to a slightly different question. Like this: ‘Let me put it like this. The Crusade is intended to enlighten mankind to what came before us, to what came before all other presently living civilizations, and to determine what, the Strangers might’ve understood about the Brood threat, and what their ancient knowledge might be able to provide us with.’ See?”

  Lyokh nodded. “You said a lot, without saying anything.”

  “There you go. Now, let’s rehearse.”

  After five or six tries, Dolstoy finally smiled and said, “Good enough. Now, let’s look at Kalder’s motivations, because you’re going to get hit hard on that.”

  “I am?”

  “You are. He has a lot of support from people who believe in wild theories about the Strangers, lots of conspiracy theorists and new-age zealots—though he hates to admit it, but will gladly use them—all of whom believe there’s some hidden truth to the Strangers that needs to be uncovered. He requires these people’s help, though he cannot say it outright. It would make him look crazy, and, more to the point, hypocritical, since he espouses logic and reason, and an open hatred for zealotry. It is a weird relationship he has with his supporters.

  “So let’s see how you do when the leader of the Crusade is attacked. You are one of his mouthpieces, whether you like it or not—and I’ve been warned that you don’t. So let’s start with this: What can you tell us about the man Kalder himself? What are your thoughts on his beli
efs? Do you share them?”

  “Those are three questions,” Lyokh said.

  “Pick one, or pick neither, just answer concisely and within fifteen seconds.”

  He nodded, and managed to suppress a sigh of frustration. “Well, I can say that he’s a man who is always—”

  Dolstoy made a face. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t say ‘always’ and ‘never’. You’ll just end up getting yourself caught in a jam later, because there’s always an exception to every rule, and when that exception should arise—and eventually, it will—journalists just love to pounce on you and say, ‘But you told us Kalder always does it one way, Captain.’ You’ll be held responsible for him making you into a liar. Understand? Trust me, they’ll crucify you.”

  Lyokh nodded. This made sense. He had learned years ago, when first called to the carpet, to make his report succinct, and to never say “never”. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, it was Lucerne who taught him that.

  “Kalder is a man whose motives…” He trailed off, then started again. “I don’t particular like Senator Kalder,” he said. Dolstoy’s eyebrows went up a fraction. Suddenly, Lyokh was speaking from the heart, and before he could stop himself, he continued. “He’s an ex-soldier, so he and I see a few things the same way, but for the most part his metal was forged in the arena of politics. I can imagine some of his soldierly experience served him well there, gave him a thick skin, but I don’t understand him or his methods. It’s not my arena. My arena is that of that the soldier, in that I’m an instrument of the will of the people. The will of the people is felt through the exercising of democracy, a democracy that votes and installs such people as Kalder as its voice. One of a thousand voices. And when a majority of those thousands of voices say that there is some hope in examining an ancient culture…well, I answer the call. Kalder is the voice, and I am the instrument.”

  Dolstoy frowned.

  Lyokh shrugged. “You said they would like sound bites and quotes. How’s that one?”

  The frown remained. “That,” Dolstoy said, “was the best you’ve performed since you walked in here. There’s a little bit in there that needs cleaning up, some rewording, but overall…not bad, Captain. The tough words about Kalder lend it verisimilitude. Let’s try that again. This time, go with that same flow: What do you think of Senator Kalder?”

  They went back and forth like this, and at first it was going very well. Lyokh answered in ways that felt more and more honest. But then, Dolstoy started finding pieces of things he had said in past statements and picking them apart. Contradictions. They were very, very slight, just minor points of rhetoric, but when magnified through Dolstoy’s lens, it was easy to hear them become distorted.

  At one point, Dolstoy went on the offensive, leaning forward and pressing him on something he’d just said. She misquoted him, took something he had said out of context, and Lyokh felt his anger rising.

  “Stop this,” Dolstoy finally said. “You’re arguing with me.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “But you said something wrong—”

  “Then correct me, but don’t argue with me. Remember, I’m the journalist, I control the pace and direction of the interview. How would you feel if someone who didn’t know a damn thing about troop muster and movement came in and started shouting at you that you’re doing it all wrong?”

  Lyokh gave vent to a sigh he’d been holding in.

  Dolstoy smiled patiently. “Journalism is their arena, and they know it well. We need them as much as they need us, but the moment you become confrontational, you’ve turned them against you, and once that happens, other journalists will look to set you off in the future, if only because it makes for a good story if you lose your temper. Understood?”

  Lyokh nodded and sighed. “Understood.”

  “Don’t sigh,” she chided.

  Lyokh wanted to shoot someone.

  : The Pubnet

  The whole network of galactic society worked like messages funneled down a corridor, one that split off into many different sub-corridors at almost every node. These days, a lot of the key information that government or military wanted to get out was sent to Asteroid Monarch, which had a few QEC transceiver/receivers, and distributed the information to starships monitoring the 387 member star systems of the Republic. The fleets in those stations then sent out that information by one of two methods: radio transmission, or tightbeam. Once the information had made planetfall, it was distributed by standard means, radio and wire.

  That’s how the first interview was passed around. It started small, just making a few waves on Monarch. The vids of Aejon Lyokh hacking his way through the enemies in Kennit and Phanes had gotten people a little familiar with him. But it wasn’t until they saw him, sitting there, resplendent in uniform and with the wyrm-sigil of the IX Legion hanging from the wall behind him, that people really saw him.

  The whole concept of the Crusade was just background noise for most of the people huddled on foundry worlds across the galaxy. It was barely thought of on the few garden worlds that still remained. It was even lesser heard of on worlds where new colonies were struggling to get themselves stable enough to live in habitats without threat of radiation poisoning every day.

  Who cares? they said. It’s got nothing to do with us. I’m not even sure where our government is located. Others wondered, Is it still going on? I thought we had lost an Imperator. How does it work without a head of state?

  But once there was a face—just one man’s face, not a hundred senators’ faces, and not just that old stubborn statue Kalder—once they saw a man, one of their own, from a small moon called Timon where religion thrived and people lived humbly, then they saw the Crusade. It had a framework now, a point of reference for all of them.

  People began to search him out, rooting through every piece they could find about him on LOG, and shared it on social media across the pubnet.

  Now the information traveled backwards through that corridor, and all those sub-corridors. It raced across planets, then was broadcast out to the Republican Navy ships guarding their systems. From there, it was QEC’d back to main station hubs, such as Monarch, then was scattered out across the galaxy. Now that Lyokh had some credibility with the people, other people—the ones who might not have been inclined to listen otherwise—began to watch and know him, and searched LOG for him.

  If Kalder had granted the Crusade political legitimacy, Lyokh had given it the approval of the people. And he had done it with nothing more than a few words. For all his preparation and speech, for all his work on his first interview, all anyone would ever be able to recall were those last few sentences.

  “To me, Senator Kalder is a hard man to know or read, but he is the voice of the people’s will, and I am the sword of their will. If they entrust Kalder to save them, then they have entrusted me to protect him. And I don’t believe either one of us takes that honor lightly.”

  The feedback was instantaneous. Though there was some controversy, no one could deny that now, for the first time ever, the Crusade had taken a front seat in many issues. A Grand Scheme of Man one news outlet called it. Another dubbed it Divine Purpose Taken Up By Men and Women of Supreme Will.

  There were pundits, naturally, who found ways to poke holes in all of this, but the more they struggled against it, the more they found themselves sinking into a morass of public opinion. Many people came out in support the Crusade, including most Christers, and a huge portion of the Tulfghan Caliphate. The latter released a statement saying that they supported Senator Kalder in all matters of the Crusade, and said that it could very well be the instrument of Allah himself, rescuing Man from his downfall, by seeking truth among the stars, and from the ancients who Allah, in His wisdom, had granted special answers to the cosmos. Answers only Allah’s truest followers could unriddle.

  By the time Lyokh’s third interview aired—accompanied by a small documentary abo
ut his life—there was a general fervor building up around the idea of the Crusade as something larger, something that all humanity could take part in. Prayers were sent up to Lyokh and his soldiers. The defeat of the Machinist Ascendancy played well with the public, fertilizing the soil of their hopes. Since one-fifth of all humanity was involved in war efforts in some form or fashion, it rang of a great victory. Finally! An undeniable, one-sided victory.

  Then there was Kalder, a man whose age was undetermined, and whose place in the Senate dated back decades, perhaps longer, but no one knew for sure, so muddled were the records. He seemed to have always been there, always standing up for the belief of restoration. Some said he was immortal. Paired with Aejon Lyokh, there seemed something destined between them.

  Christers, seeing the powerful connotations of being made part of such a huge movement in human history, began petitioning to be allowed a part in the Crusade. Other religions soon followed.

  Faith 6A was reporting the highest ever approval for both Kalder and the Crusade. And this changed things back at Monarch. It changed things dramatically. Because now, even though he was hundreds of light-years away from the seat of power, away from all his allies and connections, Kalder had managed to cultivate even more influence than ever.

  Over the next two weeks, Lyokh gave four more interviews, each one stronger than the last, and each one shared more frequently across the stars. And from halfway across the galactic arm, Kalder effectively killed two bills put forth by the Liberators by simply sending a message to the Two Consuls, and gave his support to the Restructuring Act, which his fellow Restorationists had thought would die on the floor. It passed without difficulty.

  The Crusade, before only a political maneuver, had migrated into military territories, and had now fully bloomed as a movement, as destiny manifest. And with the ceremony looming to knight Captain Lyokh, and to transform his eight thousand soldiers into the new Knights of Sol, none dared say much against these two men.