by Aaron Hubble
That last statement startled Cullen. The Great Peace? What was that? It was the first mention he’d found of anything resembling peace in this culture.
“Jane, find more references to something called the Great Peace.”
“Searching…” Jane said.
Cullen scribbled several notes on his data slate about the references to the Ma’Ha’Nae that his father would want to know about. It wasn’t much, but the admiral was a thorough person and would want to know everything.
A tone sounded from his work station. Looking up he saw a red notification.
Search blocked.
Cullen was confused. “Jane, why is the search being blocked?”
“Unknown. Anything dealing with the Great Peace has been sequestered into a secure, encrypted file.”
“By whom?” asked Cullen.
“Unknown.”
He tapped his stylus on the desktop, puzzled. Most likely the indigenous didn’t want prying eyes on another part of their past. Maybe there was valuable information that would help the CPF.
“Jane, can you tell if the encryption is the work of the native population?”
“Unknown, but it does appear to be in their language.”
Cullen sighed. That made him feel better. He’d been worried he’d stumbled upon a CPF cover-up. His initial instincts had been correct; the Am’Segid were just trying to hide something from their own people, some shameful part of their history. It made sense knowing what he knew now about the Am’Segid.
“Let’s break the encryption, Jane.”
Jane wasn’t an intelligence computer, equipped with encryption software; she was a data and number-crunching machine. However, Cullen had made several of his own upgrades allowing for faster and more accurate translation of the Am’Segid language. That helped him better understand Am’Segid physiology and therefore better regulate the necessary nutrition and inhibitor levels in the stasis pods.
“You should be able to use the language matrix I upgraded and configure it to decipher the encryption. I want to see what’s in those files about this Great Peace,” Cullen said.
“Yes, Cullen. This should take approximately six minutes.”
He smiled to himself. Six minutes wasn’t bad for a program he’d put together in half a day’s work. “Do it, Jane.”
Standing from his chair he paced the office trying not to mark the time until Jane was done. His mind drifted to the black-haired woman in the stasis unit. It was the first time he’d thought of her in two days. This project had so preoccupied his mind he’d forgotten about her. For a moment he considered inventing an excuse to walk down to the extraction lab just so he could see her while Jane worked, but then he remembered it was 0530, too early for him to be on his normal shift. It could look suspicious.
“Decryption complete,” Jane said.
Cullen all but sprinted back to his chair. “Let’s see what you found, Jane.”
Terabytes of information scrolled across the holo-window, too much for even Cullen’s mind to absorb. He halted the scroll and selected one document, a report detailing the historic signing of a peace treaty among the twelve cities.
“Jane, when was this report published?”
“Five hundred and two years ago,” Jane replied.
Cullen turned the information over in his mind. Peace treaties were often broken before the ink had time to dry. He had learned that from studying Earth’s own bloody history. “Take me to the next report detailing an armed conflict.”
There was a moment of hesitation, then Jane spoke again. “There are no reports of armed conflict after this date. There are numerous reports of cooperation between the stated cities. Would you like to read any of those?”
“Yes, I would,” said Cullen as confusion began to cloud his mind.
He read of the dismantling of each city’s military and the destruction of weapons. There was a report hailing the building of the Victory Arches in Gadol City and the decree that each city would build a tower in honor of the man who’d been the driving force behind the Great Peace, the one who’d convinced the cities to lay down their arms just as the Brink War had reached the point of mutual annihilation. The last article he looked at detailed the expansion of a continental mass transit system. It was made possible by the cooperation and shared resources of all twelve cities. The author of the article hailed the project and the unprecedented growth of Am’Segid culture.
“Jane, what’s the date of this last article?”
“This article was published in a regional news feed one hundred and twenty-five days ago.”
Cullen pushed back from his desk and gripped his head in his hands. What did all this mean? It didn’t make sense to him. He looked back up at the holo-window and scrolled through several more articles, each one detailing the renaissance of the Am’Segid people since the signing of the Great Peace five hundred years ago.
“Jane, you’re sure there are no more armed conflicts talked about?”
“No, Cullen.”
“No skirmishes or reports of new weapons innovations?” he said, grasping at anything.
“None,” she said flatly.
His mind raced. This information confused him and didn’t seem to line up with anything he’d been told by the CPF. The CPF claimed that the Am’Segid were a dangerous menace who needed to be controlled before they made Earth their next target, but that wasn’t what this information was telling him. What the data said was this planet had been free from war for five hundred years. Questions swirled in his mind.
Who had really locked the information on the Great Peace?
Had the CPF launched an unprovoked attack on a peaceful planet while spinning lies to its own citizens?
The ramifications were immense and called into question everything Cullen had come to believe about the Continental Peace Federation. If what he was reading was true, then the human race was guilty of interstellar genocide.
And Cullen’s hands were bloody as well.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Earth - Australian outback
After a half hour of fruitless attempts to fall asleep, Bobby pulled his handheld from his pocket. He needed something to take his mind off the mission. No, that wasn’t it. He needed something to distract him from thinking of how he’d left home.
He set his jaw. His head was a mess.
The way he’d left Samantha was eating him up inside. Was he putting the resistance above is family? Samantha thought so, but they were close to something big. The information they’d uncovered gave them tantalizing glimpses of the CPF’s greater plans, but they were missing the most important details. That’s why they needed Charles Dumas and why Bobby needed to be on this mission.
Still, Samantha and Luke were the two most important people in his life, but he’d failed to make sure they knew that. He would make this up to them.
Scrolling through his messages, Bobby selected the one from Fernando containing his findings on the warp engine. He skipped past Fernando’s explanation and went right to the file attached to the bottom of the message. He opened the file, revealing the history of human warp flight. Bobby shook his head. It was all too much like science fiction to believe, but Fernando was confident the information in the file was authentic.
The first piece Fernando had highlighted was dated 2016. The author was a man named Nathan Webster. The paper recounted the many failed attempts by an organization called NASA at constructing a warp engine. Bobby had to search his memory, but he thought he remembered the organization being prominent in space exploration before the plague. An entry jumped out at him. A successful test had been completed in June of 2016.
The entry read: A new day has dawned for humanity! Conceivably man will now be able to explore beyond our own solar system and determine what lies beyond the bounds of near Earth orbit. I envision the world coming together behind this project. It has the potential to unite the globe like nothing in the history of mankind. We stand on the precipice of an Earth free fro
m strife and war.
Bobby snorted at the idealistic tone of the entry. If only the man could see what had happened since then. From there the journal talked about committee meetings, reports to heads of state and an unbelievable influx of resources from around the globe to push the program forward. He skimmed the entries until he came to the year 2021, when a global space agency had been formed. Their first task had been to create a space dock where a ship could be constructed beyond the bonds of Earth’s gravity. The dock had been completed in record time and was heralded as a symbol of what the people of Earth could achieve if they worked together.
Next, they had begun construction of a vehicle they named Unity. The purpose: to travel faster than the speed of light. On March 16, 2023 Commander Able Sanchez had closed the hatch on the Unity and ignited the engines. The report stated the ship simply vanished. Twenty-nine minutes later, Commander Sanchez had awakened to find Jupiter filling his cockpit window.
Bobby read what Sanchez had written: From the time I initiated the burn until I woke up, I remember nothing. The stress on my body must have pushed me into unconsciousness. When I opened my eyes, the sight of that giant brown and white gas giant was a bit of a surprise. I was only supposed to jump to within viewing distance of Mars. The engine had pushed the Unity much faster than we anticipated and I ended up close to Jupiter. A little farther and I would have been caught in her gravity well and never heard from again. We had done it, and I had survived the trip. The goal on the return trip was to stay conscious, but that wasn’t achievable until after we had reconfigured the dampeners to compensate for the unexpected extra power the engine possessed.
Bobby tried to imagine what space travel must be like, what it would feel like to be the first person to look at Jupiter from thousands of miles away, not millions. The thrill must have been indescribable. He was surprised this information had remained buried for so long. Global pandemic and war probably had something to do with that.
Following entries recounted the numerous flights within the solar system and upgrades to the engines and the ship as more was learned. In 2078, the first long-term mission had been undertaken. On October 12th of that year the Wayfarer had pulled away from the space dock and jumped from Earth orbit, carrying six humans on the first-ever extended deep space mission. The expedition was simple: go beyond the solar system and see what was out there. The plan had been to travel for six months in one direction, explore anything that looked interesting, and then turn around and come back.
On October 15th of 2079,a year after leaving, the Wayfarer had returned to Earth to a hero’s welcome. The file abruptly ended after that. There was no information about what had discovered or if any more trips had been taken by the ship. Bobby looked up from the screen, puzzled. It was the ultimate cliffhanger. He scrolled through the message again to see if he’d missed anything, but the story simply ended. After he returned, he would need to ask Fernando if there was more of the file that he’d forgotten to send.
2079? Why did that year seem so familiar to him? He pondered it, but kept coming up empty. Perhaps it would come to him later.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aereas - Alam, Ma’Ha’Nae city under Lake Keali
The apartment was silent.
Across from Andy, Jondon sat staring at him. It was a battle of wills between soldiers with enough willpower to outlast the lifetime of a star. This had become a ritual of sorts: Jondon coming to the apartment, Jondon asking questions, and Andy ignoring the questions. It always ended the same way, too, with Jondon getting up, saying goodbye, and then leaving.
Andy wanted to know when the screaming and hitting was going to start. This wasn’t an interrogation. It was an uncomfortable, forced social interaction.
“Why are your people here?” Jondon asked.
Andy sat impassively. He’d heard the words in his own language, but chose not to react.
“You’re taking our women. Why?”
Andy didn’t move.
“Why did you attack us?”
Andy yawned. Jondon’s face didn’t change. One of these times, Andy knew, he would break Jondon’s stolid exterior, get under his skin and irritate the man in to action, or at least raising his voice.
The silence stretched on for a couple more minutes and then Jondon stood and walked to the door without saying a word.
“At some point, you’ll need to try something different. Boring me into lethargy isn’t going to work. If you really want information from me, you’ll need to embrace more ‘active’ forms of questioning.”
Jondon’s hand was on the doorknob. He hesitated and then turned back to Andy. “That’s not how I operate.”
Andy shrugged. “It’s your time we’re wasting.” He decided today would be the day he pushed Jondon. “I don’t buy the whole ‘we’re the peaceful ones’ routine. Your people did a good job of taking down my ship. That takes pretty powerful weapons. My guess is you were just biding their time until they could hit my planet. Good thing we got here first.”
A flicker of anger flashed across Jondon’s face. “Are you so blinded by whatever rhetoric has been force-fed to you? What on this planet has led you to believe we possess the ability to fly across solar systems and mount a planet-wide offensive?”
“You’ve kept this place hidden. Who knows what else is stashed away?”
Jondon shook his head. “I pity you and your people. You could have had an ally, a friend in the Am’Segid, if you’d come with a branch of peace.”
Jondon exited, leaving Andy sitting in the silence of his little room. He’d gotten a little rise out of the man. He leaned his head back and stared at the stark white ceiling. It was as drab as his existence.
Was there any truth to what Jondon had said? Could two peoples separated by light years have become allies?
That was the problem with being alone with his thoughts. There was too much time to think and question what he’d known to be the truth. Questioning his superiors was dangerous. In fact, questions had hurt his career. Wasn’t that what the CPF had always told him?
Andy couldn’t help it; it was simply the way he was made. He’d always had questions about the CPF and their goals on Earth. He even questioned some of what they were doing here, but what was the alternative? The human race would be extinct in a century if they didn’t take Aereas as their own.
He shook his head. The questions wouldn’t help free him from his situation.
Looking around the room, he felt the closeness of the walls. It was stifling. Getting out of here was Andy’s top priority, but he didn’t know how. The security was pretty tight. He’d considered trying a simple attack on his guards and punching his way out, but he still didn’t know where he was.
No. He needed to be patient. It wasn’t something he was good at, but he’d often found that answers to life’s sticky problems presented themselves when he waited long enough.
He just hoped the fighting wouldn’t already be over when that answer appeared.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aereas - Alam, Ma’Ha’Nae city under Lake Keali
“No. Like this. Thank…you.”
Calier watched the Evie’s mouth form the strange words of her native language.
“Now you try.”
He took a deep breath and forced his lips and tongue to form the alien sounds. “Ank…oou.”
The human woman smiled at him. “Not bad. You’re getting there,” she said in Aerean.
Calier sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I’m glad you have confidence in me because I don’t think I’ll get this before we leave. I think the best plan is to keep my head down and not look at anyone.”
“You only need to learn a few words to help you get by if someone does want to talk to you. You’ll have your translator so you can understand what they’re saying. But, yeah, you might want to avoid any conversations,” she grinned at him.
He chuckled, and then caught himself. He didn’t like letting his guard down around the human.
She’d been helpful and had given him no reason to think she was anything other than what she appeared to be, but she was still of the same species who’d run over his planet. He was here to learn from her, take what she had to offer, and then use that knowledge to rid his home of her kind. That was it.
She shifted in her chair. “Let’s try again.”
They went through several more exercises. Some words stuck, others seemed to Calier like random sounds with no reason. They moved on to another exercise when there was a knock at the door. Evie opened the door and Mirala entered the room carrying a bag.
“Calier. Nice to see you again.” Mirala smiled at him. “Am I interrupting a lesson?”
