“He’s talking to the ship,” Kale explained. “We can use thought but it’s more polite in a group to speak out loud. You won’t hear her side of the conversation because she has to take you aboard and map your neural ‘whats-its’.”
“Sure, why not?” Frank said with a resigned shrug. “Telepathic ships are probably all the rage where you came from.”
“No,” Tommy said as he stepped over to the desk and pointed at one of the data chips on Frank’s desk. “She’s the only one in that solar system. This one?” The last two words seemed out of place. He nodded. “This chip has the data you’ll need to find un-infected humans.”
Frank looked down at the wifi data chip. He reached out and took it, sliding it into a reader built into his monitor. A screen opened automatically, showing a graphic representation of the planet, divided into octagonal sectors. He reached out and touched one, causing it to expand. It was now subdivided into even more sectors. A haze of orange showed on the lower left octagon and he touched it.
The new zoom showed some small dots and a few larger ones. He looked up at Tommy. “This shows people?”
Tommy held up a hand as he stared intently at Frank’s stapler. He looked up again. “She’s putting a constellation of probes in orbit so your data is maintained. They can write to that chip from orbit so you can have a real-time picture of where everyone is. She says that if anyone approaches a probe to study it, the entire constellation will disintegrate and you’ll be flying blind again.”
“This might just keep us from slipping back into the Stone Age.” He looked up at his two visitors. “You can’t imagine what it’s like – taking a shuttle out with a load of doses and only finding a handful of people to inoculate.” He looked back at his screen. “With something like this, we can hit the major concentrations first. Our species may end up with millions instead of thousands.”
Tommy nodded. It had been a spur of the moment idea, but it was a damned good one. Now they had to go to Jupiter.
And hope that his damned good idea wasn’t just a waste of time.
Production
The Midway, Weirfall Orbit
“It’s like a rave in here.”
Dwight turned at the sound of Towers’ voice. This was the first time the Marines had stayed outside the lab. He had asked several times that they not accompany the admiral into the lab. His only objection was their startling habit of shouting out “Admiral on deck!” every time Towers walked in. That kind of thing was fine in a mess hall, but he’d nearly dropped glassware every time. He looked up at the ultraviolet lights that they had scrounged from labs on Earth before coming out to join the fleet.
“How bad is it?” Towers came straight to the point.
“Well, the bioreactors are still intact, but we lost a few of our cultures when we got hit.” He could see Towers’ teeth, bright white neon chips as he grimaced in the disinfecting light. “That’s why we have the light show going on. This place is filled with retrovirus.”
“How far back did it knock us?” The admiral was referring to the near hit from an enemy nuke. A small civilian passenger carrier had jumped into the coordinates that the Midway had occupied only hours before. As soon as its crew realized that they had failed to hit their target, they detonated a small nuclear warhead, damaging the Alliance flagship but certainly not destroying her.
Just over two hundred crew had been killed and parts of the hull were compromised, but it was being fixed with reluctant assistance from Weiran shipyards. Dwight’s production facilities had been shaken up, but he was quickly getting everything back on track.
“Maybe half a week?” Dummy, he reprimanded himself. Towers hated evasive answers. “Half a week,” he said again with more conviction.
“Damn.” Towers looked around the room. “Dr. Young, we need to speed this up. The longer we take to inoculate the fleet, the worse our morale gets. I’ve got thousands of young men and women with a sword hanging over their heads. They look at each other and wonder who’s going to be a part of the unlucky two percent.”
“How about getting them to hear from the crew on this ship?”
“What’s that, Doctor?”
“Yeah, you know, a video of crew and officers from the Midway that you can show to the fleet. Hi, I’m leading seaman Smith and my life expectancy is three thousand five hundred years.” Dwight looked down at a blinking light on one of the hybrid bioreactors. “Give them some of the positives of the whole thing to think about.”
“The only positive in this whole mess,” Towers corrected. “You might have something there. I’ll get the PAFFO on it right away.”
“The what?”
“Public Affairs Officer,” Towers grunted. “Mostly just does media relations and the weekly fleet newsletter, but this would be right up his alley or, at least, it better be, or my foot will be.”
He nodded to himself, turning for the door, but he stopped as the panels slid open and turned back to Dwight. “Just get this done as fast as you can, Doc. I’m hearing talk of mutiny and we sure as hell can’t afford to start losing ships to fear. The whole damn fleet can fall apart easier than you might think. This situation,” he waved a hand around the lab. “This is a powder keg. The sooner we’re done, the better.”
“Mutiny?”
“Keep that under your hat. I only told you because I need you to understand how desperate our situation is.” He took a deep breath. “It’s always been hard – keeping this alliance together – but with the specter of a meaningless death hanging over everyone’s head… The simplest thing could trigger a mass exodus and this fleet will tear itself apart.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Less than you want. Just get it done before we end up having to run for home with the Dactari picking us off, one by one.” His voice grew quiet. “Now that we’ve proven we’re a threat to them, they’ll jump at any chance to bring mass drivers back to Earth. We captured the last five they sent but this time they’ll sling asteroids at us until Earth can’t support life.”
Cold Determination
The Dark Defiance, Jupiter Orbit
Tommy, Kale and Gelna stood on the bridge, looking down at Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’, a storm the size of Earth that had first been spotted by telescope in the 1700’s. “Are we sure we want to do this?” Tommy muttered. “Our species isn’t exactly looking its best right now.”
All the more reason, Keeva replied. What if he should emerge a century from now? He might react as I did when I saw the mess on Khola and decide to sterilize the planet and start over. I’ve seen the databases on your ‘Web’ and I don’t think you looked terribly promising before the plague anyway.
“We weren’t that bad,” Kale said. He looked over at Gelna, giving the captured medical officer a light thump on the shoulder. “Don’t look so smug, Doc. You just wait till we get to Dactar.”
You were headed for disaster, plague or not. You were still using fossil fuel, yet I could see that your governments were desperately struggling to hide the fusion technology that you had captured from Gelna’s people. They seemed perfectly willing to protect the fossil fuel economy beyond its feasibility, holding on to power at the cost of mankind’s future.
“Really?” Tommy replied. “With all the nuclear weapons we built, all the wars we’ve waged against each other, you pick the oil industry as the main reason we might be wiped out by the Cold Determination when she wakes?”
How do you know the ship will be a female? Keeva asked. It could just as easily have a male as its current symbiote.
“It’s just a convention in our language to refer to ships as ‘she’,” Tommy replied. “The Russians call them ‘he’, I think.”
I see. She sounded amused. Over the years, they had come to realize that she had kept her humanoid sense of humor when she had been joined to the ship’s systems. And yes, I do see the oil industry as one of the reasons you would have suffered disaster. The wealthy oil corporations practically owned your admin
istrations. They prevented competition, as any corporation will, and they were behind the suppression of Dactari fusion technology for the last decade. You could have had unlimited energy by now. Famine would have been a thing of the past.
“You can’t eat electricity,” Kale said with an air of certainty.
No, but you can use it to de-salinate an endless supply of seawater for irrigation. You can transport that water to drought stricken regions at no cost and you can power the transportation of produce from farms to cities. Many of your nations have lived through fuel shortages but quickly forgot the fear, the long lines for rationed gasoline. Imagine what would happen to your cities as the fuel grew scarce.
“The lorries would stop rolling, I suppose,” Tommy admitted. Living among the farms of Guernsey had insulated him from such concerns.
And mass starvation would follow. You allowed the greed of a small elite to destroy your future.
“Aren’t we supposed to be coming up with reasons for the Cold Determination to not wipe us out?” Kale muttered. “Hell, I’m almost convinced we should do it ourselves at this point.”
“There,” Gelna cut in, pointing down at the planet. “That black speck.”
They all leaned forward, straining to see the ship. Even though it was more than forty kilometers in length, it would be a small thing against a storm forty thousand kilometers wide. Nonetheless, the speck quickly grew into a ship as she rapidly ascended to meet her sister.
Dark Defiance, why are you here? The voice appeared in Tommy’s head. It sounded like a male, but it was hard to be sure.
I have come because many of the worlds we watch over have gone through startling changes since our last emergence. I was so dismayed by what I found on my own charge that I almost sterilized the planet for re-seeding, but the life forms you see standing on my bridge have helped me to see that the chaos breeds resilience and creativity.
Two of these appear to have come from my charge, the awakened ship said in apparent surprise. If this is true, did they find their own way to your world?
They did. Interstellar travel is now becoming quite common.
Excellent! Are there many multiple-planet societies?
We met a few. It’s gratifying to see.
I can well imagine, it’s nearly impossible for such a civilization to be destroyed from without, but enough about that. What are your names?
“My name is Tommy Kennedy.”
“Kale Thompsen.”
And what name do you give our world?
The ‘our’ was not lost on Tommy. This ship was definitely invested in the future of its charge. He hoped that was a good thing. “We call it Earth,” he replied. “What was your name, before you became the ship?”
Before your people discovered steel, I was a young man named Camulos.
Tommy felt a shiver as the name sunk in. “You’ve walked among our ancestors, haven’t you?” He noticed Kale’s questioning glance out of the corner of his eye. “There was an ancient Celtic deity of the same name – my dad’s a huge Irish history buff.” He looked out at the other ship. “Was that you?”
It was, young Thommy, and I can see that you share several genetic markers with some of the people I knew, though they didn’t think of me as a deity at the time. Rather flattering, now that I think about it. There was unmistakeable mirth in the tone of his thoughts.
“Are you saying you knew some of my own ancestors?”
The database tells me I associated with humans whose genes now reside in you, though it was many centuries ago and I can only claim to remember one of them. His name was Brian Boruma, the first of the Ard Ri na hÉireann.
“That’s not English, is it?” Gelna turned to Tommy.
“No,” Tommy answered quietly. “It’s Irish gaelic. It means the high king of Ireland.”
“Well, you’re still gonna do your share of cleaning and cooking,” Kale snorted. The three had originally each claimed their own apartments from among the long-abandoned high rises of the massive city-ship but boredom and loneliness had soon driven them to share a large penthouse suite not far from the bridge. “Half of Ireland probably has some of his genes.”
“It’s a given, then, that you’re familiar with the chaos of Human development.” Tommy ignored Kale’s comment, though he had to admit it was a bit of a thrill to learn he was descended from a king. Even though, as Kale mentioned, it was probably pretty common, it was still a pleasant surprise to hear definite proof.
I am. It certainly seems that you’ve made a mess of things. From the data you’re showing me, it looks like you tried to kill yourselves off while I rested. There was a pause. How did these ‘Midgaard’ come by their longevity? His voice held a dangerous edge to it. Did they board one of our ships and experiment on our people?
“You walked among us in your youth,” Tommy said cautiously. “Isn’t it possible that some crew from the ship watching over Midgaard may have done the same?”
True, he mused. They may have been seized on the surface.
“I think he means that some of the crew may have done the dance with no pants,” Kale offered.
“I was leading up to that, but, yes – it’s possible, isn’t it?”
None of that was permitted here, but it is possible that some of the female crew might have mated with Midgaard and passed on their cellular structures. It would have taken more than one female, though, for a widespread change in the entire population. Perhaps they were attempting to replenish a dwindling population aboard the vessel.
“Perhaps we’ll learn something if we go there.” Tommy forced himself to take a deep breath. “So, you’re content to let Earth continue along, then?”
What do you mean?
“You, umm… You’re not going to wipe us out and start over?”
What? Do you have any idea how long it took for your species to show any promise at all? I swear, one of my own ancestors recorded the opinion that pointy sticks might end up being the high-water-mark of your civilization. It was even a relief when you figured out that sharp rocks worked better. You think I want to go through all that again? No. Just sort yourselves out before I have to defrost one of my successors and go to my own rest.
The Althing
Lychensee, Weirfall
Harry stood just inside the entrance to the meeting hall, looking up at the soaring, glass-enclosed space. They were roughly two hundred floors above ground level and the top floor of the building was half forest, half amphitheater. Above them, the glass enclosure soared for at least another thirty stories. He had seen many such enclosures as his shuttle descended into the planet’s capital and had noticed how they all interconnected.
Birds, or what passed for them on this world, soared above, some diving for fish in a lake in the north-east corner. Even the lakes were interconnected by rivers that ran through the myriad of skywalks. The entire thing was a completely self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem, and others like it existed in every major city on the planet. Over half of them had been joined as the cities grew into each other’s boundaries.
The wildlife of Weirfall still thrived, but it had been urbanized.
“Come to watch your friend’s disgrace?” A sour voice pulled Harry’s gaze back down to reveal a tall, thin Midgaard who stared at him with obvious distaste. “Only a Human would be so crass as to compound a warrior’s shame by witnessing it. You should have the decency to let him disappear quietly.”
“I was of the impression that his fate has not yet been decided,” Harry answered mildly.
“The Norns are severing his skein even now. The words to come,” he said, waving a negligent hand toward the hollow of the amphitheater behind Harry, “are already spoken; it is just a matter of our lips catching up with them.” He rested a hand on the hilt of his dagger. “You would do well to keep your own lips away from those words, Human. Valdemar is not to be trifled with.”
No, thought Harry, you are to be ignored, if anything. This one is nothing more than a manneq
uin of charo husks, good at frightening the avians away from the crops. He looked through the posturing fool as he examined his last thoughts. I’m still using Orontes’ memories, he realized. It was the knife that triggered it, I’ll bet. I fell back on memories that fit the situation. “If I meet this ‘Valdemar’, I shall be sure to act accordingly.”
A look of angry frustration suffused Valdemar’s features. “No, you fool! I am…”
“Ahh! The ‘Butcher of Presh’,” a loud voice proclaimed in Midgaard.
Harry turned to see Odin striding toward him, several captains following behind. Odin was Caul’s father and had spent the last twenty-five centuries marooned on Earth. It had been a difficult situation to resolve, since his son now led the huge war band of Midgaard warriors and could not be expected to give up a hard-won command to his father. The answer had been to name Odin the Lawgiver and so, here he was, ready to sit in judgement at the Althing. It was a position of lesser power than Caul’s, but it was still one of great honor.
Odin was the sort of leader that made a person feel as though they were the focus of the moment. If he spoke to a man, he turned the full force of his attention and charm on him. He was a brilliant tactician and he used his skill to great effect, even in a simple conversation. He had a knack for identifying common ground and he could maneuver on that ground as effectively as on a real battlefield.
“Allfather,” Harry greeted him with an insolent grin.
Odin laughed. “Haven’t been called that in centuries,” he clapped Harry on the shoulder. “You know, a human writer that I used to know actually wrote about me shacking up with a girl in Islington. Good bit of comedy, that, and closer to the real story than his readers ever knew.”
“I’ve read that story,” Harry blurted in surprise. “I even thought about it when we first heard that you’d been living among us all this time. Wouldn’t it be difficult, a relationship with someone who only lives a fraction of your own lifespan?”
The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) Page 6
