by Nick Webb
Another woman stood there, her leg in a mobile cyber-cast, her sensible suit still tattered and torn and stained with blood.
“Long time no see, Mr. President.” She extended her hand.
“Senator Cooper. Glad to see you alive.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Britannia Sector
Orbit of Britannia Debris Cloud
ISS Dirac
Bridge
“Charles!” Captain Scott yelled across the bridge from the ops station. “Where are the error bars you promised me?”
“Almost done, Captain.”
She was busy with her own analysis. It was a surprisingly complex problem, but after an hour of taking new data and running it through their model, they’d finally come up with a preliminary result. A matrix of numbers that was laughing at her, little fuckers. She needed a better way to do this.
“We need to visualize this,” she said, and stood up to approach the central tactical station. “Holoprojector on,” she said aloud, and waved her data from the previous station to the tactical display. The projectors lit up, and above the station floated Britannia. Oceans and continents and as beautiful as she remembered.
“Captain?” said Commander Simmons. “Do we have something?”
“I can’t tell yet.” She manipulated the matrix of numbers on her pad and waved them up to the projection. A red curving path arced over the surface of Britannia, wrapping around the planet and meeting up with itself where it started. “Here’s what we’ve got so far. This path represents the possible locations of the artificial singularity. But it passes over two continents and thousands of miles of ocean. In theory, it could have been anywhere along that path, and until Charles finishes up the probability distribution, we don’t have a clue as to where.”
Commander Simmons turned to the science station. “Lieutenant?”
“I already bugged him about it, Commander. Riding his ass won’t help,” she said, her face still buried in her data pad, trying to figure out something that was nagging at her.
“Captain, we just detected a private gunship q-jumping into orbit of the debris cloud.” The officer at the tactical station was looking at her. Probably wondering what to do. Unfortunately, she didn’t know his first name yet.
“Roger?”
“Ma’am?”
“Ralph?”
He looked mildly uncomfortable, based on his repeated glances toward Commander Simmons. “Uh, it’s Sergio, actually.”
“Sergio. Excellent work.” Wait, what work did he do, exactly? Besides relay what his console told him? Whatever. Inspire confidence, Rayna. “How ‘bout you just keep an eye on it for me, okay? Let me know if anything suspicious happens. Don’t want some idiots messing up my data collection.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
She turned back to Lieutenant . . . Charles? Goddammit. N’bozo? Just pick one, Rayna. “Throw me a bone here, Charles. Gimme something.”
“I can give you preliminary data at least, Captain. Huge error bars, but it might help,” said Lieutenant N’bongo.
“Fine. Send it over.”
He waved a data packet from his console over to the tactical station, and the curving red line changed. Part of it became more red, and the rest of it faded away from pink, to light salmon, and finally fading to white on the opposite side of the globe from the brightest red.
“The color scales with the probability density,” said N’bongo.
“Yes. That narrows it down quite a bit,” said Simmons. He pointed to the reddest part of the path, which followed the edge of one of the continents. “Looks like it most likely originated on the southern coast of the North York continent.”
“Near any major cities?” said Captain Scott.
“Kinda close to the capital, but not quite. Goes right through all the beach resort towns nearby, though,” said Simmons.
“Beach resorts. Hmm.” Something was nagging at her. “Why would there be an artificial singularity at a beach?”
“Narrowing up these error bars, ma’am, that ought to help,” said N’bongo.
Moments later he waved more data up, and the red got more red and much smaller in length. The pinks and salmons all mostly disappeared to white.
“I can probably get better than that, ma’am. I’ll just need another hour at least—we’ll need to take another data set to constrain the bars,” said N’Bongo.
The nagging feeling landed on something solid. She half-remembered something. Not just anyone would have any kind of contextual relevance to artificial singularities. Someone in the military? Maybe. Politicians? Okay, sure. But one figure stood out to her, and she accessed a database to make sure.
“Yes. There she is,” she smacked her console a few times.
“Ma’am?”
“Commander, is it just me, or does this path seem to be centered directly on the retirement home of former president Barbara Avery?”
Simmons leaned in, compared the data to the map provided in Avery’s data file she’d pulled up, and nodded. “Sure looks pretty damn close. Either that, or Sparky’s Bar and Grill is doing some pretty shady shit in their basement.”
“Uh, ma’am?” the tactical officer interjected.
Captain Scott didn’t even turn. “Yes . . . Sergio?” She actually recognized the voice. Progress, dearie.
“You told me to keep an eye on that gunship? Well I’ve been keeping track of what comms channels they’re using. It’s all encrypted, of course, but one meta-space channel might be of interest to you.”
A half second pause. “Don’t keep me waiting, Sergio.”
“It’s a channel that the Secret Service tends to use.”
That got her to look at him. “You don’t say. Well. That saves us a trip. Comms, patch me through.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Britannia Sector
Orbit of Britannia Debris Cloud
Crimson Phoenix
“You’re . . . glad to see me alive.” She stifled a laugh. “I’m sure you are. I knew you’d far prefer beating me in an election than winning by default due to my untimely death.”
He couldn’t help but chuckle, in spite of the dire situation they’d just been in. “Indeed.”
“John. It appears we have a problem. Someone’s trying to kidnap both of us.”
“I agree, that is a problem.”
“No, that’s not the problem,” she added, the wry smile gone.
At first he thought she was joking. He’d only met her a handful of times and she’d never seemed like an ironic, dry-witted jokester, but their meetings were always in an official capacity, in the presence of dozens of other senators and officials—not to mention press—and only for a few minutes at a time.
“The problem is not that some shadowy person or organization is trying to kidnap the president of United Earth and the major party candidate trying to take his job? Oh? This ought to be good.”
“Calm down, John—”
He hadn’t so much as raised his voice, so he took that as a patronizing comment. “I’m calm.”
“The problem is that the people I thought were trying to kidnap me, in fact, aren’t. But these people? In that ship that took out Interstellar One?”
“You don’t know who they are?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.”
“So you know of people trying to kidnap you?”
She nodded. “I mean, I’m just a few steps away from the presidency. The Secret Service keeps a list dozens of pages long of extremist groups, terrorists, pirates, interplanetary mafia organizations, you name it, all of which could reasonably be suspected of wanting to kidnap or kill the president of United Earth, or his expected successor—”
“Expected? Aw, now you’re just being mean.” He was just about done with her already. He turned to the other woman, who had been standing back at a respectful distance just outside the airlock the entire time talking to Tapper. “I know you now. Liu. Former IDF Intel. Married Proctor’s kid.”
“You got it, Mr. President.”
As if he were listening in, Danny Proctor’s voice came over the comm system. “Mr. President, I’d come down to welcome you in person, but we’re not quite out of the woods yet. You’re both welcome to join me in the cockpit.”
Sepulveda turned to Liu again, mouthing the word cockpit.
“He means the bridge. Can’t get past his tiny cargo freighter days where four of us squeezed into a cockpit meant for two.”
“Right.” He raised his head up to the wall where it seemed Proctor’s voice was coming from. “What do you mean, we’re not out of the woods? We q-jumped away, did we not?”
“We did. To the ruin of Britannia. But, well, why don’t y’all just come up here.”
“Fine.” He motioned to Liu. “Lead the way, please. Tapper?” He turned to his Secret Service officer. “We need to reestablish contact with Danforth and my staff. Let them know I’m alive. Confer with them about next steps. But keep it discreet—don’t broadcast it to the entire service. Just Danforth and Sukarno. Someone knew I was going to be at Donnelly Station. We need to be careful.”
We need to be careful. He felt like he’d just understated the understatement of the year.
“Yes, sir, I’m already on it.” Indeed, Tapper had been working his data pad the past few minutes, presumably trying to get a read on their current security situation.
Liu led the way down a hallway, past several more doorways and up a few short flights of stairs, and before long Danny Proctor was waving him onto the bridge through an open door. “Permission to come aboard, Captain Proctor,” he said, observing what he thought was the norm.
“Permission granted, Mr. President! Glad we found you in time.” Danny Proctor looked younger, somehow, than the last time they’d met, aboard the Skiohra generation ship Benevolence just two months ago.
“About that: how did you find me? My location was supposed to be, well, classified would be a given, but I was under the impression from my security that literally fewer than five or six people knew where I was. And so you’ll excuse me if I’m not mighty curious.”
“My companion. He had a hunch.”
“Your . . . companion?” He turned back to Fiona Liu. “Is a man?”
Danny laughed. “Fiona’s my wife, Mr. President. No, I mean my Valarisi companion. Through the proto-Ligature. He could feel you were in imminent danger, and had a good sense of where you were.”
Maybe Oppenheimer was right to be paranoid of the Valarisi, he thought. If they know where I am at all times….
“That’s … both comforting and I admit, disturbing, Mr. Proctor. I’m sure my Secret Service chief will want to have a chat with you about that—”
“Let’s get to the point, Captain Proctor,” said Senator Cooper, interrupting. She was really starting to grate on him. “Why are we not out of the woods?”
Danny motioned toward his command console. “Well, I mean, we’re technically safe for now. But the IDF comms channels have absolutely exploded. All the IDF ships in the vicinity have been called away.”
“All ships?” said Sepulveda. No. It couldn’t be. They weren’t ready. “Away to where?”
“Just about all ships stationed in the Britannia sector. There were only half a dozen to begin with. We’re basically alone here, except for the ISS Dirac. I guess they’re sticking around since they’re just a science vessel. But all the ships at Wellington shipyards. Every available ship in the system. All of them.”
Sepulveda turned to Tapper. “Have you gotten through to Danforth or Sukarno yet?”
He shook his head. “No, sir. Trying to establish a link through the meta-space transfer network, but it’s very unresponsive right now.”
Captain Proctor nodded. “Makes sense. The regular comm lines in the system are practically jammed with traffic. Meta-space too.”
“Can you tell what’s going on?” said Senator Cooper.
“Something about assembling the fleet at the rendezvous point at Jupiter before they proceed to the target.”
“Oh God.” Sepulveda held a hand to his face. “That’s the plan in the case the Findiri showed up to make a direct strike at Earth. Gather at Jupiter, then intercept as far out from Earth as possible.”
The bridge went silent. No one seemed to know what to say. Finally, Cooper sat down in an empty chair. “So it’s true. They exist. And they’re here already. I half-thought your party made them up, John, to keep everyone scared and in line.”
Sepulveda didn’t even care to rebut her. His mind was whirring with the possibilities, the contingencies, all the plans he and Oppenheimer and the top military staff had made in case they were indeed invaded so soon after defeating the Swarm.
“I have to be at Earth,” he said.
“Me too,” said Cooper. “Mr. Proctor, we should be moving on. I need to speak to your wife’s former associates at Intel.”
Tapper grunted. “Mr. President, I highly advise against that at the moment, until we can assess the security of the situation there. Interstellar One is—”
“Goddammit, I know Interstellar One is destroyed! But I’m the Commander in Chief. My place is at the head. Leading the defense of Earth. Not hiding out in the safe emptiness of space where I can do exactly nothing.” He paused for a moment, then turned to the senator. “Cooper, who did you think was trying to kidnap us?”
She shrugged. “Any number of groups, but I had my suspicions about which one. The GPC.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me. The GPC? Why? They’re trying to set themselves up as the legit government of all humans off Earth. What possible gain would there be for them to do this? As soon as the people find out, they’re over. Through.”
She nodded along to what he was saying, “I know, I know. But what you don’t know is that Speaker Curiel . . . is alive.”
“Curiel? I just skipped his funeral a few weeks ago!”
“That’s wasn’t Curiel. I mean, there was probably no body in the coffin anyway since the story was that he died on Britannia. Regardless, he’s alive now.”
“And why have you changed your mind about him?”
“Because, Mr. President. Until we picked you up I thought the attempt on my life was just that. An attempt on my life. Some extremists trying to make a political statement. I could see how perhaps a radical element of the GPC would try that. Not Curiel himself—at least not directly. But some fringe element that did it with his tacit blessing. Let him have plausible deniability and all that. I was ninety-nine percent sure.”
Sepulveda shook his head. “Why would you think that? He’s the head of what is trying to be a legitimate interstellar government. You can’t go around blowing people up by night and writing constitutions by day.”
Cooper scoffed. “Just ask Sinn Fein about that. And Hezbollah. And the Sons of Bolivar. And the Veracruz Liberation Movement. My god, you’re naïve.”
“What’s his motive though? Just a little trigger happy? Trying to throw everyone off? Chaos?”
“It’s obvious, I thought.” She rolled her eyes at him, and turned to address Danny and Fiona, as if to signal that they were far smarter than him. That little fucker. “I was elected on my platform of joining the GPC. He wants the GPC to become the main interstellar political organization, supplanting UE. By killing me he hits two birds with one stone. He generates sympathy for the cause by making me a martyr, and he gets me out of the way so he can maintain his sole authority if UE ever joins the GPC. Think about it. If I were elected next month to replace you, and bring us into the GPC fold, then I’d become the political heir-apparent of the new, much larger nation that would be born. He couldn’t abide that thought. He wants it all for himself. At least, that’s what I thought, once I found out he was still alive.”
“Pftt. Your opinion of your own importance is the stuff of legends,” said Sepulveda.
She ignored him. “But now? With your kidnapping attempt? I’m starting to think that our narrow escape—thank you again by the w
ay,” she nodded to Danny and Fiona, “was not an escape from death, but from an abduction like yours. Someone wants us both. Alive. And that is concerning, because I have no idea who would have the capabilities and the motive for something like that. Curiel would never dare destroy Interstellar One and an IDF space station. A senator? Sure. A president? Nope.”
Captain Proctor had been reading something on his console. “Hang on people, we’re getting a hail. It’s the ISS Dirac.”
Sepulveda pointed at him. “I think it goes without saying that I’m not here.”
“Same,” said Cooper.
Proctor shot them a look. “I’m many things, but a dumbshit ain’t one of them.”
Sepulveda sighed. “Just—careful, son.”
He tapped a button on his console. “This is the Crimson Phoenix, private vessel registered to the Shovik-Orion corporation on San Martin.”
“Danny? You there, dearie? It’s me, Auntie Rayna. Listen, dearie, I need to talk to Sepulveda. Got something he might want to see.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Britannia Sector
Orbit of Britannia Debris Cloud
ISS Dirac
Shuttle Bay
Captain Rayna Scott met the dignitaries in the shuttle bay, alone. Not out of secrecy or privacy, but because why send an ensign to do the dirty work of entertaining politicians when she was perfectly capable herself? Besides, they all had far better things to be doing, like tightening up her error bars.
“Mr. President. Senator.” She nodded to both of them as they debarked. “Secret Service officer. And . . . Danny’s fiancee?” She looked Liu up and down, then grabbed her and pulled her into a bear hug, in spite of the looks of consternation from Liu. “Any daughter-in-law of Shelby is a daughter of mine.”
“Captain Scott, thank—”
“It’s Auntie Rayna, dearie.” She hadn’t let go yet, and didn’t want to. Because that would mean it was time to talk to politicians.
