One development Eugene and his senior team members weren’t thrilled about was the military’s growing influence through AESA defense collaboration. Not that it was a surprise. The only real surprise was that it had taken this long.
Invariably, the first question asked about a new technology is, “Can this make killing less of a hassle?” The second being, “Can I have sex with it?” As a rule, someone always says, “Yes.” When man first harnessed flame, it was immediately used to start grass fires to drive game. It took time before he realized he could also use fire to harden clay bricks. GPS was created to advance the art of accurately blowing up undesirable foreigners with high explosives. Making navigation safer for air travel, commuting easier for motorists, or helping find people lost at sea were afterthoughts.
This question was on Eugene’s mind when, early in the afternoon, he received a summons to report to the American/European Union building for a Q&A session with members of parliament. Eugene had attended such meetings before. They traditionally ended with the politicians believing they had all the answers, and the experts questioning why they’d bothered to come.
He brought up Harris’s link on his tablet and hit Connect. “Thomas?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Grab your dress uniform, lad. We have to impress some important people tonight.”
* * *
Later, in Eugene’s Jaguar, Harris struggled with his uniform’s white belt.
“That looks a little snug,” Eugene said.
“It shrank. Must have gotten wet.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with you spending the last year working with sedentary academics.” Eugene could have sworn he saw a bit of blush forming on Harris’s dark cheeks.
“Why don’t you ask Felix to partner up on a workout routine? It would do you some good, and it could really help his confidence.”
“You think so?”
“Hard as it may be to believe, many years ago I was a scrawny, socially awkward youth myself. It’s not an easy mind-set to break free of.”
“Well, at least you seem to be cured of the former,” Harris prodded from behind a toothy grin.
“Ouch. The wound is deep,” replied Eugene with good humor.
“Can I ask you something, sir?”
“I believe you just did, but you can ask me something else as well.”
“Why me?” Harris seemed confused, but not pleading.
“Why you, for what?”
“This meeting. What questions can I answer that Felix or Jeffery can’t? They’re much more qualified to discuss the details of what we do than I am.”
“Simple,” Eugene replied. “Felix, Jeffery, and I are peas in a pod. We’re all civilians, academic elitists, the nerds. But you, Thomas, you’re the atheist in the pews. Your military background gives you a perspective different from the rest of us. Different, and possibly more valuable to them.”
“More valuable than the scientists doing the actual work?”
“You forget who we’re talking to. These are career politicians. Ignoring or denying the work of experts is a prerequisite for the job.” Eugene’s voice had more than a pinch of lemon zest. “No, they already have a course charted; we’re presenting ourselves so they can cherry-pick our replies to validate the decisions they’ve already made.”
“So why go at all?”
“Because they hold the PIN on our accounts.”
“You’re afraid the military is going to take over the program,” said Harris flatly. If he was offended, he didn’t let it show.
“Not explicitly, no. The AESA has never in two hundred years handed over all control of a project to the armed forces, and to my infinite surprise, the age-old treaty banning weapons in space is as strong as ever. But that was put in place to prevent us from destroying ourselves. Now that there are threats from beyond, I don’t know if it can continue.”
“A challenger appears,” said Harris.
“Indeed. I fully expect we’ll be seeing more uniforms around the office, more ‘consultants’ and ‘advisors’ offering their two cents in ways that will be difficult to refuse.”
Harris digested this for a few moments as the lights of the downtown grew below them. “What do you want me to say to them, Professor?”
Eugene realized Harris had cemented his competing loyalties with the question. “I want you to speak your mind, Thomas. You have a good one. You don’t give yourself enough credit. Just because you’re not as schooled as the rest of us doesn’t mean you’re deficient in the noggin. When you start second-guessing your instincts and try to game what other people want you to say is when you’ll dig yourself a hole.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me just yet. I’m the one leading you into the lion’s den. At the lion’s invitation, I might add.”
Within the hour, they sat in a lavishly appointed parlor surrounded by rich wooden panels and straight-backed chairs with ornately carved armrests. Tiny, irregular tool marks witnessed to their handcrafted origins. They were sinfully cozy. Chair makers had life figured out; there’s hard work to do before you can sit comfortably.
Harris fidgeted in his chair, going over the creases in his uniform like a cadet awaiting inspection from a particularly demonic drill sergeant. Eugene sympathized, but after years of politics at various levels, he was no longer entranced by the wielders of power. The uncomfortable truth was the personal qualities that made someone most likely to be elected had little to do with competence or integrity.
Several members of the American/European Union Parliament filtering into the parlor were case studies in that very phenomenon. Eugene knew many of them personally. They were MAEPs from districts with large AESA research or industrial footprints like Florida, Hesse, Germany, and Paraí, Brazil. They were insiders, already aware of the ARTist program. There were also a few outsiders, presumably being briefed on the program for the first time. Eugene recognized a couple of the others. One in particular strengthened his suspicions about the meeting.
His name was Gladstone Rockwell, although the political press had dubbed him “Gladhand” on account of his unrivaled ability to grab government appropriations for his home district. You could smell the oak and bacon grease from three meters away.
On paper, Rockwell represented the Chicago-Milwaukee metro area. This was a polite fiction. Everyone knew his real constituency was Lockheed-Boeing-Raytheon, which had an unassailable position as the largest defense contractor on the planet. They provided arms to everyone from Warsaw to Walmart.
Space represented the final frontier to many, but none so much as the defense industry. With very few exceptions, space had remained free of weapons since the earliest days of space flight. The Outer Space Treaty, properly known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (toner wasn’t as expensive back then), had only officially banned the placement of nuclear weapons in space or the construction of military bases off world. For a number of reasons, a gentlemen’s agreement between nations had expanded the narrow wording of the treaty to include all kinds of offensive weaponry.
However, where there were fences, quarreling neighbors were never far behind. The discovery of mankind’s fence had the potential to trigger an arms race not seen since the fission-stoked days of Cold War paranoia. For Lockheed-Boeing-Raytheon, that meant defense contracts worth untold trillions, which was why the presence of MAEP Rockwell this early in the process made Eugene so uncomfortable.
“Isn’t that right, Professor Graham?” said a familiar, charismatic voice.
“Hmm?” Eugene looked up. “Sorry, I was trapped in a thought. What was that you said?”
“I was saying your team’s research was bearing fruit.” The voice belonged to MAEP Danielle Fenton. Officially, she was the chairwoman of the Advisory Board for Civilian Development of Space (ABCDS). Unofficially, she was the head of their secret
circle, and reported directly to the AEU president. Mrs. Fenton also happened to be the former student who’d roped Eugene into his position as AESA’s administrator. That had been one election and two last names ago for her.
“Indeed,” began Eugene. “Our boys and girls have managed to translate many of the messages we’ve found, and the first product of our reverse-engineering efforts is about to begin testing.”
“Gosh, that’s really exciting,” said Gladstone Rockwell. “I’ve only just started reading your reports today, but it sounds like you’re sitting on a gold mine of technology. I was really excited to read about your man Fletcher’s work on faster-than-light propulsion.”
An alarm went off in Eugene’s head. Felix’s suspicions about the buoy’s FTL communication had only been put in this morning’s report. Either Rockwell was an impossibly fast reader, or he had been briefed on the project earlier than Eugene had supposed.
“I’m afraid you may be getting ahead of yourself, Mr. Rockwell, is it?”
“Please, my friends call me Gladstone.”
Eugene managed not to say, And what about people who don’t trust you farther than they can piss Jell-O?
Instead, Eugene continued, “Well, Gladstone, Mr. Fletcher is working on the very early stages of a hypothesis. He believes that the buoy has an FTL communications system. Not propulsion, just signals. The buoy itself seems to only have a low-powered antigravity drive, not nearly as powerful as the gravity drive aboard the Magellan, for example.”
Rockwell pursed his lips. “Well, why spend time on that? Our QERs work instantly and can’t be intercepted. Surely that’s a better system.”
“In some ways, yes. But you must remember QERs only work in pairs, and their bandwidth is abysmal. FTL coms could drastically speed up broadband signals in system. But for now, it’s only a guess. Felix—I mean, Mr. Fletcher—has only just started work on his hypothesis.”
“I see.” This obviously wasn’t what Rockwell had hoped to hear. “So there’s no application for propulsion, then?”
“It does not appear so, no.”
“So it will still take decades to get ships out there and confront these aliens.”
“Confront them?” said Eugene. “That’s a loaded choice of words.”
“What would you suggest? As I understand it, we’ve just discovered that we’re being caged like zoo animals,” Rockwell said.
“I would hardly call a network of buoys a cage. It is probably just a way for them to mark off territory set aside for us.”
“Oh, well, that’s mighty thoughtful of them to decide what our territory is going to be,” Rockwell said sarcastically.
“The border is thirty light-years away. If it’s a sphere, you’re talking about a volume of over 110,000 cubic light-years. It might take us millennia to fully develop all the systems within that space,” Eugene said earnestly. “It’s not as though we’re about to run out of room.”
“Well, that’s a very calm, reasonable position, I’m sure. One could almost call it dispassionate.” Rockwell let the words fall in such a way that the contempt could be clearly seen swimming just below the surface. “What say you, Sergeant Harris? Surely a military man must bristle at someone else building fences for you.”
Harris’s head came up quickly. He looked surprised, but then his eyes looked past the opinionated parliamentarian and settled onto something apparent only to him. He spoke.
“When I was a boy, my family lived on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the sprawl, next to an old Japanese couple. They made good neighbors. The women shared recipes, and my father and the old man would sit on his front porch and argue about the Eagles and the Phillies over shots of sake and a bag of pretzels.
“Then one Saturday morning, we woke to the sound of a hammer banging. When my father went outside to see what the ruckus was about, our neighbor was erecting a white wooden fence. My father was confused. He interrogated us kids to see if we had done anything to upset the neighbors. We hadn’t because we liked them. They always gave us lemonade in the summer. Then my father felt insulted and angry. He stopped talking to the old man. A few months later, the old man fell ill and died.
“After the funeral, my mother went to comfort his widow. She asked my mother why my father had become distant a few months before. She told her it was because of the fence. My father was offended that her husband didn’t try to talk about whatever the problem was first. The old woman began to cry. She said, ‘He built the fence to keep the raccoons out of my garden.’”
“And the moral of the story, Sergeant Harris?” asked the gentle voice of Mrs. Fenton.
“My father never thought to ask why the old man built it. He just assumed it was meant as an insult,” Harris said. “The moral is we don’t even know why these aliens built this buoy network. Maybe we should ask them. Look, I’m not immune to getting angry or even cracking some skulls when necessary, but first let’s make sure we’re getting angry at the right people for the right reasons.”
Rockwell shifted uncomfortably in his seat, but remained silent.
“Sage advice,” said Fenton. “But the president believes that, at a minimum, we need to … introduce ourselves to our neighbors.”
“That should be simple enough,” Eugene added. “Magellan is still close to the border and has more than enough endurance to make a deeper push. Order her to come about and start looking for the mystery ship again.”
“While that’s true, the president feels the Magellan and her crew aren’t ideal for the task.”
“Aren’t ideal?” Eugene sat forward in his chair. “Their performance has been exemplary! Ridgeway and her people have been indispensable to our research efforts.”
“It wasn’t meant as a slight, Professor,” Fenton responded in her gentle tone. “We’re all grateful for the work of Magellan’s crew. However, the president feels that we should ‘put our best foot forward,’ and the Magellan is over half a century old.
“What the president proposes is a crash program to design a purpose-built starship with cutting-edge technology that we’ve gleaned from the buoy. Once that’s completed, we’ll launch a dedicated mission with a crew trained to communicate with the aliens in their own languages. They will be prepared for the delicate negotiations likely to come on the heels of first contact.”
“And who would comprise this crew?” asked Eugene.
“No decisions have been made, but a preliminary list is being drawn up. If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to add them for consideration.”
“I don’t like it, Danielle,” said Eugene.
“Don’t you mean Mrs. Chairwoman?” injected Rockwell.
“Why, Gladstone, I didn’t peg you for someone preoccupied with formalities,” Eugene said sharply. “But in this case, no, I meant Danielle. When you’ve known someone since her first summer out of high school, a bit of familiarity comes as a perk.”
“All right, boys, zip your trousers up. We’re all on the same side here,” said Fenton. “What specifically don’t you like, Professor?”
Eugene turned back to his former student. “Even if our estimates for the new gravity projectors are accurate and we launched tomorrow, it would still take almost fifty-five years to get a ship to where the Magellan is right now. It just seems to me that a handful of new gizmos and slightly more specialized personnel aren’t good enough reasons to put this off for decades.”
“I expressed the same concern to the president, but the interim will give us the time we need to master their languages, iron out any bugs in the new tech, and formulate an extraterrestrial policy that everyone can live with.” She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers. “And with over three dozen government bodies representing almost two hundred countries and colonies, that last one is going to be no small accomplishment.”
Eugene deflated a bit and decided to concede the round. “I see your point.”
“You always did, eventually,” Fenton said nostalgically. She glanced around t
he room and took note of the awkward looks on the faces of some of the other MAEPs. “I think we’re all on the same page now, so let’s dig into the details.”
Three tedious, trying hours later, the meeting wound down as everyone filtered out. Eugene held out his hand for Harris to help him up.
“Thank you, Thomas. The hips have seen a lot of abuse over the years.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Graham would be scandalized to learn that,” said Danielle.
“Not one straight man in the whole organization,” lamented Eugene. “Danielle, a moment?”
“Always for you, Professor.”
Eugene nodded appreciation. He spared a moment to take in her countenance. She’d aged well. No, aged was the wrong word. Danielle had matured. She wore her slightly graying hair and barely noticeable wrinkles like copper wears its green patina.
As a student, Danielle had fierce confidence in her work and arguments, but lacked it in herself. In a way, her young self strongly reminded Eugene of Felix. But that was obviously in the past. She had grown into a strong woman whose presence commanded authority effortlessly. Eugene realized with a trace of recrimination that Danielle was probably several years older than his own wife. Then he remembered the previous evening’s festivities and stopped feeling bad about it.
Eugene waited until only he, Harris, and Danielle remained.
“All right, Professor. What is it?”
“I’m waiting for the other tasteful size-eight pump to drop.”
“Size seven, actually, and I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come now, Danielle. Anything we build now will be just as antiquated when it gets out there as Magellan is today. So pull the other one. It has bells on.”
Fenton sighed in resignation.
“What did he really say?” asked Eugene, with his arms crossed.
“Well, it started with a lot of ‘Who do they think they are?’ and ‘They messed with the wrong planet,’ but the finale came with ‘Nobody makes a monkey out of this president.’”
Gate Crashers Page 12
