Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “Are you going to answer me or not?”

  “I’m very old now, Captain. I entered politics at a time before we were in such a lowly state. When I began my Course of Honors, I had no idea what I was getting into. The lies. The deceptions and manipulations. By that time, I was well into my studies as a Zeroist, and everything in my career stood against it. That’s why, to this day, I remain the only Zeroist to have ever held public office. My Zeroism is tested every day, for every day I come across the same problem. It has to do with game theory, that if every player is doing the same skullduggery—like cheating, or manipulating people, or gaming the system—if everyone is doing that, but you’re not, then how successful do you think you can actually be?”

  “You’re talking about corruption,” Lyokh said. “And becoming corrupt yourself to counter your opponents’ corruption.”

  “I’m talking about the way things are,” Kalder said tersely. “Your opponents get to use every resource, using both the official rules and the ones they make up as they go, whereas you are shackled to only the official rules, the legal ones. You are effectively crippled. So, how do you win? If you cannot lie or cheat, yet all your enemies can, how do you win? Tell me!” he all but shouted.

  Lyokh did not hesitate. “You expose the corruption, weed it out.”

  Kalder nodded patiently. “And I would admire any man who tried. But he would fail. But you have another option. You could choose to withhold.”

  “Withhold what?”

  “Everything. Withhold all that you know. Don’t lie, or else you risk exposing yourself down the road. Speak little about your true intentions. Find those people you can be open and honest with, tell them a little, but never tell them everything.”

  “Why not?” asked Lyokh.

  “Words are water, and every person that hears them leaks, some more than others.”

  “Tell me why you’re doing all of this, Kalder. Tell me now, or so help me—”

  “Did you know that, the more you tell people your goals, the less likely you are to achieve them?” the old man said. He nodded sagely to himself. “There’s an old saying: ‘If they don’t know your dreams, then they can’t poke holes in them.’ Also, stating aloud our goals produces hormones in the brain that make us feel good, especially from the social acknowledgement we receive from our friends for even attempting it, which tricks the brain into thinking the goal is already halfway done. Talking too much about it actually dissuades you from accomplishing your goal. It is for this reason that Zeroism teaches silent pragmatism.”

  Lyokh put a hand on the senator’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “Is this your fancy way of getting around to saying that you’re never going to tell me why you sent me in there, unprepared, knowing something might happen?”

  “Captain, I am in charge of this Crusade, and this fleet, so if I want to tell you to fuck off, I can do so. If I want to treat you like a mushroom, keeping you in the dark and feed you shit, I can do that, too. I don’t answer to you, you answer to me.”

  “I answer to the Visquain—”

  “To the Visquain of Crusade Fleet,” Kalder said.

  Lyokh wrestled for words. “What?”

  “I received permission earlier today. In light of recent…comms glitches, I am empowered by the Senate to create an ad hoc Visquain. All the captains of Crusade Fleet have been informed. Until further notice, Crusade Fleet is to have its own Visquain, overseen by Captain Donovan and I, with three other members of my nomination.”

  “An exclusive club filled with your cronies. Desh is one of them, I imagine?”

  “Captain Desh is there, yes. As is Moira Holdengard, though she doesn’t know it yet. And you.”

  Lyokh had been about to lay into him about Desh overstepping his boundaries, but was once again halted by Kalder’s words. “What? Me?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a moment when he sensed the trap, but couldn’t tell what it was. Kalder had sent him into the Watchtower for some reason he couldn’t fathom, possibly to activate the Watchtower. But how had he known Lyokh would be able to activate it? The man knows things. And if Moira’s message was right, the man is a killer. He sets traps. “Why would you include me in your Visquain?”

  “I require the most experienced of our fleet.”

  “I’m a Captain of the Ninth Legion, I answer to Visquain, I cannot be made part of one. And Moira isn’t even military.”

  “She once was,” Kalder said. “We are all in unswum waters here, Captain. We do what we must to survive, and cling to one another to remain afloat.” He clapped Lyokh on his shoulder, a gesture as uncomfortable to Lyokh as he knew it must be to a Zeroist. “Now come, our first order of business as Visquain awaits. We’re going into Taka-Renault, Captain, and I fear it’s going to be bloody.”

  “My understanding is the people of Taka-Renault do not present a Romulus and Remus Problem.”

  “They don’t. But there is recent intelligence I fear you haven’t seen. Sensor data from Ramlock’s probes. A large fleet of Brood ships are potentially moving towards Taka-Renault. The coincidence is too great, we believe that they were drawn to the system by following our own operations around it. We may have brought doom to the Takans, so we owe them this.”

  “Owe them what?”

  “Aid against the Brood.”

  Shocked, Lyokh stepped in front of Kalder, blocking his path. “You’re talking about going to war against the Brood, to defend the Takans?”

  “Yes.”

  “There can be no winning against the Brood, Kalder. Every fleet that faces them dies, every man that doesn’t flee from them is killed and absorbed into them. There is no winning. You go in there, you send people to their deaths. Probably all of us.”

  Kalder started to walk around him. “That’s not the Aejon Lyokh I’ve heard about.”

  Lyokh stopped him again. “What are the ‘ghosts’ at Eaton? How did the Ascendancy’s Champion know the words Moira heard at Zhirinovsky? How do you know about all of this stuff with Watchtowers and visions? What are you not telling us?”

  Kalder eyed him at length. “I see our resident stellarpath has been leaking things. You recall what I just said about words being water, Captain? I am proven right.” A cloud fell over his features. “Perhaps I was wrong to trust her with so much.”

  “You’re still not answering.”

  “You’re right, I’m not.” He finally stepped around Lyokh, and this time Lyokh did not stop him. “Come to the War Room, Captain, and let us discuss in what glorious manner we wish to die.”

  THE TWENTY-THREE PLANETS of the Taka-Renault System rotated in front of them like they were all a bunch of celestial gods. At the center of the system was the white main-sequence star Veronica, named after one of the system’s founders’ daughters. Moira sat in the corner of the room, wondering what she was doing here, and if Kalder had been serious in his message that she was now, officially, part of a military Visquain. She felt out of place. Beside her, Desh sat slumped in his seat, his face aglow with the light of multiple 3D displays.

  Captain Lyokh stood off to her left, his back against the wall, along with a few of his Knight Companions. Lyokh appeared moody, like someone had stolen his wallet and his girl, and he suspected someone in this room.

  Next to the Knight Companions were Donovan, Ishimoto’s captain, Fee of the Voice of Reason, Trepp of Miss Persephone, Utica of Ecclesiastes, Oblavsky of Vaultimyr, and Brother Penitent Phillipson of Tao of Piety. Representing Task Force Mahl was the High Priestess herself, as well as Prophet’s captain, a bald, heavily scarred woman named Ta.

  The High Priestess was sitting in full regal clothing, wearing the Face of Mahl, which appeared as the face of a phantom in the flickering display lights. Once, Zane’s eyes seemed to turn in her direction, and Moira looked quickly away, and studied the layouts that Ramlock and Ark of the Redeemed had brought back from Taka-Renault.

  Kalder was currently bringing everyone up to speed, while sitting in a ch
air beneath the Sigil of the Republic mounted on the wall behind him. It was probably an accident, but Moira had to smile to herself, seeing the position of the man and the Sigil as some kind of commentary or satire.

  Kalder finally yielded the floor to Ortimeyer, Ramlock’s captain, when the specifics came up. Moira watched Ortimeyer wave his hands, which brought up the details, which followed her ecliptic coordinate system, and filled in names and data that Ramlock and Ark had gathered while there.

  Veronica had two planets orbiting very close to her, Thustra and Torrence. Torrence had been mined extensively for iron and oxygen, according to Ramlock’s captain. A government called the United Congress of Pelgotham had erected drone factories there, entirely unmanned, and which rested on Torrence’s poles, riding the line between the freezing nightside and the scorching dayside. The drones used those elements to make giant mirrors, which the UCP had used to make a network of solar energy-collecting satellites. They had not created a true Dyson sphere around Veronica, but a small swarm, just as Moira had predicted based on the data.

  All that energy was stored and transferred back to the main hub world, called Deirdra, third from the sun. Her single moon had been occupied and farmed for helium-3 for the last nine hundred years.

  The next planet beyond Deirdra was Jehovah, a gas giant with massive rings, and six moons that were inhabited, but only by use of prefab housing and warehouses, with lots of ice farming and space stations for hauling ice. The next two planets were rock worlds, one terraformed and ravaged by nuclear war, the other having gotten halfway through the terraforming process before multiple wars destroyed its giant atmospheric processors.

  There were three asteroid belts, all of them sparsely occupied, mostly by drones that were the property of some dead government, but still going about their business. Two major dwarf planets, Ignus and Preitoras, were inhabited by dying, inbred heathens, who had destroyed the space stations closest to them to make deep-space travel difficult for all incoming ships, effectively cutting themselves off from the rest of the system.

  The next four planets were all gas giants, with moons with similar stories as Jehovah’s.

  An ice world sitting in the ninth position from Veronica had been successfully terraformed, with some patches of greenery growing among the five major cities there. All of the other eighty million inhabitants lived in variations of communities not unlike the Eskimos of Earth Cradle.

  “All the starships that were ever generated inside of Taka-Renault were generated by one of eight governments,” said Captain Ortimeyer. He paced around the holographic model of the system as he spoke, his gray hair and beard looking tidy, his eyes looking sharp, despite the long and tense mission he’d just returned from.

  “As we discovered in communication with the UCP’s leadership, there were wars that took place far from home. Lots of battles done by drones, nuclear weapons detonated on unpopulated moons and worlds, but which took out countless drone factories. These attacks were committed over several wars, and done so as to weaken each nation’s resources. Deirdra’s population skyrocketed, peaked at around eighteen billion, and all nations became desperate for water, both for consumption and to fuel their starships.”

  “How are they getting along now?” asked Lyokh.

  Moira looked over at him, seeing clearly the tension written on his face. She knew he had gotten her message, for she had received the notice. She wondered what it had done to his opinion of Kalder.

  Ortimeyer said, “The peace took place two hundred years ago, and they’re only just now rebuilding—the first hundred years or so were spent just trying not to die, dealing with mass radiation poisoning on all worlds. They seem to have developed an advanced method of dealing with rad-soaked bodies and healing them. For the most part, this technology was shared amongst all the governments, and recovery has slowly begun.

  “But there are still animosities, and some of the other nations of Deirdra believe that our transmissions to them were a hoax. One nation called the Nastanin Emirate States actually fired on us, using deep-space torpedo-carrying buoys. We dealt with it easily, but Ark of the Redeemed was also chased briefly by a droneship belonging to the United Horbien Kingdom, and then harassed by a starship of indeterminate origin, only half its engines were working, probably a pirate vessel. It’s all crude tech there, dusty, not well maintained at all. Only the United Congress of Pelgotham were convinced we weren’t a hoax and would speak openly to us.”

  “When it comes to communication,” Lyokh asked, “how do their methods stack up against ours?”

  Ortimeyer shook his head. “It doesn’t. They once had QEC technology, but the wars knocked them out, killed most of the people who knew how the transceivers were made, and wiped out pubnet systems across whole worlds, erasing most of the information concerning them. Lots of lost knowledge there.”

  “Not too dissimilar from us,” Moira commented.

  Everyone looked at her.

  She flushed for a second, then became a little terse. “What? You’re telling me you people know someone that can rebuild this ship’s Pacifier if it stops working?”

  Kalder nodded. “Point taken, Miss Holdengard. What’s happened in Taka-Renault is a microcosm of the fluctuations our own Republic has seen. That’s why this mission is so important,” he said, speaking to everyone now. “Regathering mankind, to please the Liberators. Bringing in fresh new talent and resources, to please the Corporatists. And restoring the values of a xeno-less society, to please us Restorationists.”

  Moira looked at him. She knew about his Xeno Nonconformist Bill, what she didn’t know was why such xenophobia. Was it something that had bloomed out of sheer hatred for the Brood, or was it something else? Had something specific happened to him to cause such acrimony?

  “But, as it stands, we have something blocking us from a joyous reunion with our cousins,” Kalder said, standing and waving at the hologram. It brought up a menu, and after a bit of scanning, the senator pulled up images of the broodling, the ship’s silhouette highlighted in infrared, radar scans, neutron-imaging, and even clear, if distant, vid imaging.

  The broodling appeared to be a shard of onyx metal, rounded at the sides but its bow filigreed into a sharp point, its tentacles splayed out in front and behind it, not moving, frozen in tableaus of wickedness. The vids showed it moving, silent as an assassin’s blade, while hundreds of small asteroids orbited it.

  “Ramlock’s sensors did thorough scans of the thing,” said Kalder. “It appears to be dead. The people of the UCP claim they’ve known about it for about a thousand years, but even at their height, they did not venture towards it. Now, they couldn’t even if they wanted to.

  “And there is another problem. You all read about it in your summons, but you don’t know the extent. The Brood. They are most certainly coming towards Taka-Renault. A relatively small group, probably only four or five broodlings. Both Ramlock and Ark confirmed spacetime distortions with sensors. Large-mass objects are on a direct course.”

  “Are they maybe coming to claim their dead mate?” asked Desh.

  “It’s difficult to say. They’re coming in from the opposite side of the system from it, right around a protoplanet amid the Oort cloud. We still have probes there gathering data, as well as a wyrm flock and two ’screamer squadrons.”

  “Does the UCP know that they’ve got incoming Brood?” Lyokh asked.

  Everyone looked at Kalder.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it doesn’t really matter. They haven’t a clue what the Brood are. Besides the dead broodling, they’ve never encountered them.”

  “In five thousand years they’ve never been bothered by the Brood?” Moira said, surprised. “Not even at their height, when they had ships that could go farther?”

  “It would appear not. They are completely out of the loop on this. Captain Ortimeyer informed them of a possible alien threat, as a means to get the other governments to be more open to talks, as he offered them protection. Again, many o
f them think it’s a hoax cooked up by some enemy nation to distract them.”

  “And what about the coincidental timing?” a Knight Companion asked. Moira thought she remembered his name as Tsuyoshi. “The Brood show up after thousands of years of leaving them alone?”

  Kalder nodded. “It’s possible we inadvertently have done them in. The most likely answer is that the Brood simply were unaware of Taka-Renault until our interest.”

  “Which would mean they’ve been monitoring us closely,” Moira said. “They knew about our itinerary, about the Crusade.”

  “If that’s the case, it would be the first time the Brood have shown a real interest in humanity, or in any race for that matter. Before now, all they’ve done is attack blindly, never with any pattern, and defend the planets they’ve destroyed and converted for their hive-cities. They’ve never indicated that they care about our media or transmissions more than what it takes to jam our frequencies. They don’t care about intelligence or counterintelligence, it’s all brute force attacks with them.”

  Lyokh detached himself from the wall, approached the table. “This would suggest they have a reason. A reason to be at Taka-Renault. They’re making it a point to go there. Why?”

  “It could be because mankind has a rallying point,” said Kalder. “If they’re monitoring us, then it indicates they actually do understand our language, or economy, our culture, and our media. So…perhaps they know what the Crusade represents, what the Hero of Phanes means to the people, what Faith 6A reports indicate, and what the Knights of Sol symbolize.”

  Kalder looked at all of them.

  “Mankind resurgent. True restoration. A rekindling of some ancient glory we once enjoyed. It seems the Brood will not suffer humanity’s hope. They come now to extinguish us, my friends.”

  “Then what do we do?” asked Tsuyoshi.

  Kalder looked over at the Knight Companion. “We are cut off from Second Fleet and everyone else. Our QEC transceivers are suffering technical glitches, possibly due to attacks on our computer systems by the Ascendancy. I’ve been made commander of the fleet, and have been instructed to form a new Visquain. And not a momet too soon, for we have now lost total long-range QEC capability, only interfleet QEC still works.”