A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1

by Stewart Hotston

  She cast her eyes over the contents of the letter; thank you for your willingness to represent Euros etc. etc. Please find enclosed data on the boy.

  She stopped. He’s not my jurisdiction, she thought. He was not even something she had files on. Restricted High Technology was nothing she’d ever been involved in, nor did she have any desire to be.

  Before she continued to read she assigned her Primary AI to chart the implications of being sent the letter. Specifically, she asked it to be mindful of the political parameters such an event suggested.

  Then she went back to Euros’ note:

  “Promise to be frank, war will not be won, boy must be secured for calibration. The American Senate is unconvinced of the need to stop Indexiv, you will be aware of their own experiments with Normals. The Oligarchies are divided. Indexiv’s actions are not statistically predictable.”

  The AI reported back with conclusions supporting the explanation in the letter. It suggested that she would be asked to deal with the boy only as a contingency. She was on call should Euros’ other plans fail primarily because of her location and the assets in her immediate vicinity.

  You mean the fleet?

  The AI went on to suggest that Indexiv’s plans were unpredictable. She asked it why. The AI’s presence in her mind faded away as it calculated before answering. Because its most likely course of action is too unlikely to be likely.

  That did not satisfy her. What is its most likely course of action? she asked.

  The destruction of the Amazon Fell. Genocide.

  She stretched a leg out from under her, massaged blood back into it. She reviewed the AI’s conclusions as warmth spread back down to her toes. The probable loss of the Amazon wasn’t much of a surprise, there was going to be a war. High intensity resource reduction, or genocide, was not implausible given Indexiv’s openness about such a strategy. She found them reprehensible but Helena could not see what was so unpredictable about these possibilities. She recalled her Primary AI and asked it a negative. Why is genocide so unviable?

  To kill all human beings on the planet would necessarily end Indexiv’s existence, came the answer.

  She swallowed and pushed her head back on her neck, chin touching chest. Everyone? That kind of genocide? None spared, not even the Oligarchy? Helena began to ask another question, except she was suddenly thrown from her seat across the desk. She landed with her head twisted around between the desk and the wall. In her mind a cursor flashed, unanswered.

  She came to. Hands were shaking her roughly.

  “Lady Woolf, wake up.” It was Ngasi. She groaned, attempted to work out where she was. She tried to open her eyes but found that the left one would not move. Somewhere inside, beyond the reach of her concentration, her Secondary AI was talking at her.

  “Lady, you must come with me.” Ngasi had placed her flat on her back on the desk. The sofa was overturned, stacked up against the wall, little plastic feet poked out into the air. Lifting her head, she saw his face over hers, his eyes wide with animalistic fear. She could not summon the focus to listen to his heartbeat or monitor his alpha waves. She realised her face was wet. The liquid on her cheek seemed to be coming from her left eye; the one that would not open.

  Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. Blood: She could taste blood. The realisation brought her around enough to delve into her consciousness. Her Primary AI was offline, as was her Tertiary.

  I must have received a head wound, she thought dazedly. Helena felt hands go underneath her and bring her up onto her feet. She was only stopped from falling by those same hands clasping her tightly. She wanted to be sick.

  “You must come with me,” said a deep masculine voice. Ngasi, she thought, how dare he touch me?

  “Get your hands off me,” she said violently, trying to throw him off, nearly collapsing in the process. Ngasi did loosen his grip, but only in order to get better purchase. Helena allowed him to support her weight as she finally succumbed to being led wherever he wanted to take her.

  She dimly registered the klaxon call of an emergency, heard shouts, the clattering of feet, syncopating to the screech of panic.

  “Where is Jensen?” she said.

  “Dead, ma’am. Commander Hodges is at the helm.”

  She forced herself to initiate communication with her Secondary AI. It was like running through a glass door. She felt the connection go live, the first thing the Secondary AI did was commence a detailed monologue of what had happened. The images of the last few moments were not appetising.

  She suppressed the out of body experience involved in watching footage in which she was flung like a child across the captain’s ready room. She realised that the package from Euros was still in the office.

  “Take me to the commander,” she demanded with as much force as she could muster.

  “Our orders are to get you safely away, ma’am,” came the reply.

  “I don’t care what the commander thinks, take me to him.”

  There was no change in their direction. “Ngasi…” she began.

  “Ma’am, our orders are to get you away.”

  She did not have the energy to break from him. Her Secondary AI informed her that the concussion she had suffered would have to be lived through, but the catalogue of other injuries, including a black eye, would be repaired within forty minutes. Too long, she thought. The only injury she wanted fixed was her concussion yet she faced the absurdity of having to experience it in full.

  I need to be able to stand on my own two feet.

  The sirens were drowned out by a crashing roll of thunder. The lights failed, plunging them into twilight. Her eyes immediately changed to lowlight, but Ngasi was left fumbling, needing to hold her with one arm while he tried to find his way along the corridor.

  “What is happening?” she asked.

  “Incoming,” was the reply.

  “From where?” There was no response. A group of young men passed them; she could smell blood and fear. The floor tilted away from the horizontal, suddenly becoming a slalom run. The slant was followed by a lurch in her stomach as the Amazon began to lose altitude.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now,” she said to Ngasi. He said nothing. Emergency lights came on, flickered red, then sputtered out. Not good, she thought.

  Her Tertiary AI blinked back into life and she could almost feel the computer in her brain smiling smugly to itself. Letting Ngasi take her weight, she logged in to the ship’s computer. It was dying; all that she could get out of it was a warning of a critical flood of the hydrogen engines with oxygen. The core reactor temperature was rising rapidly, but they were still there so it hadn’t combusted yet. With that she lost contact. The Amazon Fell was dead in the air.

  A hatch opened away from them onto the landing bay where she had come into the ship less than an hour ago. The hopper was buzzing; ready to flee the destroyer. The pilot was back in the cockpit. At least, she assumed it was him.

  Ngasi put her into the passenger seat, shouted at the pilot over the roar of the hopper’s engines and the din of explosions coming from the world around them. The hangar doors opened in a belch of smoke as Ngasi leaned away from her to shut the door.

  “Ngasi, the Amazon is dead,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied quietly. She opened her mouth to say something more but the deck shuddered, whipping her breath away as she was thrown into her seat.

  Ngasi held the door in one arm, ready to slam it shut.

  “Ma’am, please don’t let them kill my parents,” was all he said as the door swung shut. He came close to the window as he checked it was secure. He banged twice on the metal fuselage then stepped away.

  “Hold on, ma’am,” said the pilot, pulling back on the joystick. The hopper lifted itself off the hanger deck and slid out of the Amazon in one fluid movement. Ngasi stood at the entrance to the hangar watching, making sure, as far as he could, that they had safely left the destroyer. Helena could see his eyes in the clouds of smoke
pouring in through the open bay doors. She lost sight of him before he left the hangar.

  Chapter 2

  Helena turned in her seat to watch the Amazon Fell hang in the air, slowly swaying like a flag caught in the lightest of breezes. Black, impenetrable smoke belched from her sides. From Helena’s vantage point, rapidly accelerating away though she was, it was easy to make out the two missile strikes on the starboard side, above and below the tide line.

  Helena twisted herself around as much as pain and safety harnesses would allow, just in time to see a shuddering stutter in the destroyer’s posture. With this last gasp, the Amazon Fell gave up the fight and plummeted into the ocean beneath. The surface of the sea held the ship aloft for a few painfully drawn-out seconds before whatever fires raged inside her reached the hydrogen cells. The entire structure ignited in a shattering blossom of fire.

  Covering her eyes, despite them automatically filtering out the brilliance of the blast, Helena made out the brief conflagration of the Amazon Fell before the wreckage finally slid with alarming speed under the surface of the Pacific. There would be no other survivors.

  She watched the empty scene behind them until it vanished from view before relaxing back into her seat.

  For a moment Helena’s mind felt as if it were being squeezed tightly and then her Primary AI came back on line, its familiar presence flooding her mind. As Helena silenced her AI’s request for an explanation of recent events, there was a sudden shadow in her consciousness, which surprised her; but before she could focus on it, the AI’s presence had receded, pushed away by her need to concentrate on the here and now.

  I should probably check to make sure it’s not damaged, she thought.

  As she settled into her seat, the pilot reached down between his legs. He handed her the package from Euros. Ngasi had placed it on board whilst she was fidgeting with her harness.

  Holding it in both hands, the dry, slippery texture of polyespalene beneath her fingers, Helena had no desire to open it.

  “How long before we reach the 2nd Fleet?” she asked.

  “Five hours to Brisbane, ma’am. Assuming no bogies,” replied the pilot.

  “We’re headed for Brisbane?” she asked. “Why aren’t we meeting the rest of the fleet?” She was frightened; she’d been expecting the war to play out safely on a screen while she sat safely in London.

  “The 2nd Fleet is in a firefight, ma’am, engaging the same forces that intercepted the Amazon.”

  “Who was it?” she asked, not really needing to hear the answer, driven instead by the need to talk in the face of this sudden crisis. To have some semblance of normality. Helena could not shake the unreal sensation that none of this should be happening to her. The impression of being in a dream hung around her, like a fog that would not burn away.

  “Indexiv, ma’am,” said the pilot.

  “Are we armed?” she asked casually, looking away from him as she did so.

  “No, ma’am,” came the reply.

  She sat back and looked out across an empty sea, its tranquillity no longer a sign of calm.

  If war had broken out anywhere else, there was no indication of it when they flew into Brisbane. The pilot took the hopper over Euros’ docks, into the heart of the old colonial city. The ancient buildings looked like quaintly arranged dolls houses beneath them. Coming in over downtown, the pilot held their altitude as they navigated between the Icicles, the legendary Benobo Headquarters around which the modern business district aggregated.

  Banking south, they skimmed through the sector, avoiding the busiest intersections of traffic. Helena did not know Brisbane at all. Where are they going to put us, she thought as they left the heart of the city behind them.

  Their approach brought them in over the commercial heart of the city, a couple of kilometres south of the river, she spotted their destination: an old skyscraper, dating back to her parents’ generation. Compared with the towering Icicles and the elegant skyline of the city to the north, it barely deserved to be called a tower. In contrast to contemporary structures, moulded by nanotechnology from superconducting magneto-polymers, its dull metallic gleam marked it as being constructed from steel, concrete and glass. At approximately sixty stories, Helena thought that it must have been impressive when first built. Now though, it looked tired; a shrunken grandparent lost in the shadow of its descendants.

  Few corporate vehicles came near this part of the city. The majority of airborne traffic could be seen zooming among the gleaming spires they had passed through kilometres to the north.

  The newer part of the city was built on reclaimed land. Global warming had been kept at bay over the centuries via barriers, booms and land reclamation projects, until the encroaching catastrophe had finally been brought under control thanks to new energy sources and geo-engineering projects.

  Advertisements were at a minimum, unlike along the great floating sidewalks of the commercial and residential sectors. Even the ancient colonial heart appeared full of personalised holographic technology.

  As she had watched from above, their images flashed broadly to her, even as they kept their distance. Helena had hoped that they would be too high above the city for the AIs controlling the hoardings to respond to their presence. Instead, they linked to the hopper’s ident beacon using it to beam Euros targeted media towards them from all angles. The advertising was designed to be visible only to the specific person being flashed.

  Helena was disappointed. If the marketing AIs had ignored her she could have seen Brisbane as it was, clear of any corporate logos.

  She felt battered and irritable. In order to observe her recovery to its satisfaction, her Secondary AI was still refusing to administer painkillers.

  At least I’m safe again, she thought to herself. Now they were in friendly territory she felt the urge to catch up on the news. She tried to patch herself through to traffic control but was blocked by her own AI.

  Too much strain, it said. You need to sleep instead of stretching yourself out too thinly. A boost to your serotonin levels before attempting electronic communication with the outside world again is advised.

  Sighing, she was delighted when the pilot nosed the hopper into a descent. He brought them in to land gently on the top of the tower. There were two figures standing on the pad waiting for them.

  Johannes Von Freiburg, her uncle, welcomed her down onto the landing pad.

  Helena was surprised to see him but she was pleased as well; his familiar face helped her to relax almost immediately. He was First Generation, a managing director. That he’d come to meet her was a blessed relief.

  Johannes was tall. At two metres, he was ten centimetres taller than Helena, leaving her eyes level with his chin. Johannes maintained a heavily muscled physique; something that her older brother Michael suggested was an expression of his unending need to be the alpha male.

  He’d chosen charcoal grey eyes, a faintly warm skin tone and a face that spoke of subtlety and hard winters.

  The other man with him was not an Oligarch, but she knew him just as well. Oliver was her uncle’s manservant. He stood away from them, a couple of metres behind her uncle. In contrast to Johannes, Oliver was fragile. Despite being more than a hundred and fifty years younger than his employer, at sixty-three, Oliver looked thirty years older.

  “Good to see you Helena. Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Johannes.

  “Fine. Nothing permanent, at least,” she smiled.

  “If you say so. It was a close thing, there,” said Johannes grimly.

  “I could do with something to eat,” said Helena, she hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours and was aware that her AIs were fiercely burning calories as they mended her injuries.

  “Of course,” he ushered her, a hand at the small of her back, from the pad into the tower. The top floor was a penthouse apartment, with the living space stretching across almost half the floor’s footprint. Leading Helena to a crowd of soft, wide recliners that were arranged in a broad horseshoe
in one corner of the living room, he excused himself. With a nod to Helena, Oliver followed his master out.

  She took off her jacket, examined it for damage. She didn’t remember putting it on, but she could smell Ngasi on it. He must have dressed her before she’d recovered from the concussion. Made from a derivative of calf’s leather that was suppler and stronger, it smelled gently of wildflowers.

  After the sinking of the Amazon Fell, it was covered in her blood, its glory gone. The conducting polymers that laced through the weave were shorted and useless. On a whim, she decided to store it when she got home. It was a memory she could return to after all this was over, a prop to help her deal with the events themselves. She made a decision to remember Ngasi through it. The yoke and left sleeve were stained a dark brown where the cleaning agents had not yet been able to break down her blood. She touched her cheek but could feel no outward trace of her injuries. Any blood on her skin had been consumed by her nanomachines before it dried. Helena did not need to look in a mirror to know that she looked every bit the same as when she had been negotiating with Schmerl. Putting one hand down on the chair by her side she thought, something is missing: the package.

  She cursed herself for a simpleton: That’s the second time I’ve left it behind without thinking.

  Helena moved to the window of the apartment, which overlooked the landing pad. The pilot was sunning himself next to the hopper. She could see his helmet on his seat through the open hatch. Besides his exceptionally large eyes, his face was fully human.

  Unaware that he was being observed, the pilot stretched out his limbs, closed his eyes and turned his face into the sun.

  Enjoying the world like the rest of us, thought Helena, his calm bringing her a sense of transitory peace.

  Johannes returned with two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice and handed one to Helena.

  “What happened?” he asked firmly. “Tell me everything.” Johannes’s obvious presence did not bother her even if for many years being near to him had made her feel like a young girl, even when she realised this was exactly the impact he was aiming for.