The Tau Ceti Agenda

by Travis S. Taylor

  "You think so? Hmmm. I dunno, Senator, everybody knows I'm a Skins fan," President Moore replied with a sly grin. "Now let's have it. What is this all about, Hardin?" He held out his hand and shook Senator Hardin Madira's hand familiarly.

  "All you need to know is on this patch," Hardin said, handing Alexander a small, flexible memory tab about the size of a dime. Moore took the patch and stuck it behind his left ear.

  Abigail, download and store all information from this patch.

  Yes, Mr. President.

  And go through it all. Get me a summary quickly.

  Already working it, sir.

  "So what is this going to cost me, Hardin?" President Moore asked.

  "My district in Wyoming needs some economic revitalization. With the Martians gone, somebody needs to do the terraforming systems manufacturing. I want it. I'm earmarking seventy billion for it, and I don't want it cut in a line-item veto."

  "You think you can get an earmark that size through both houses?"

  "I can if you can convince a couple of your brethren from Mississippi to vote with me."

  "I can put in a few good words. Maybe twist some arms. Yeah," Moore said.

  I've got the summary for you, sir.

  Let me see it.

  Here it is. Moore started to scan through the summary that Abigail had developed from the data.

  "You're giving me the election, Hardin."

  "Well, that's politics. You're giving me a reelection in return." There were always several meanings to every political move. Moore would have to watch himself closely around the senator. Who knows what else he might want in the future. But for now, this was good enough. It would take one phone call to Amaka Chi to put a stop to the entire affair.

  "Good enough, Hardin," he said, nodding approvingly. "Good enough."

  November 2, 2388 AD

  Washington, D.C.

  Monday, 9:35 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

  "In surprise to everyone from Sol to the Oort Cloud today, the impeachment hearings of President Moore were brought to an abrupt halt. The attorney general today released evidence that indeed the blueprints for the QMT-4 teleportation technology were leaked to the press, but not by the White House. It turns out that the blueprints were altered and then leaked to the press by the FBI as part of a sting operation to uncover a double agent in the Department of Energy laboratories at Los Alamos. The sting operation was ongoing and classified in a compartment that the Tau Ceti Commission was not privy to. So, they reached the conclusion that real information had been leaked. Apparently none had been. The interesting question that was left lingering was if the leaked information was false, how did the Separatists develop the quantum membrane teleportation technology? The attorney general replied that just because the Separatists are fanatics does not mean that they don't have smart scientists working for them also.

  "This news and the replay of footage from the president's speech this morning, where he introduced heroes from the terrorist attacks and from the now unclassified raid on the terrorist facility in the Oort Cloud, has flipped the polls completely. All of the polls now have President Moore taking both Orlando and Luna City, giving him more than enough votes for reelection. It seems now that all that is left to do is vote."

  "She wants to see you, Alexander." Sehera sat down beside her husband on the couch in the media room. He was watching the news on every channel at once and was grinning, as he would say, like an opossum.

  "What about?" Dee hadn't been in a very talkative mood the night before when he kissed her forehead and told her good night. The last couple of days had been a lot to handle. Maybe now she had reached the point where she was ready to talk about it. Alexander didn't know, but at least she wanted to talk about something.

  "I'm not sure, but she wants you." Sehera took the remote from her husband and started flipping the side screens off, leaving just the one larger screen in the middle projecting. Then she started scanning the guide for programming that she fancied. "Well, go."

  "All right." Moore sighed and rose slowly to his feet. He was a little sore from his long run the day before. He had been running but hadn't run that far that fast in a few weeks. He stretched his ankles and flexed his toes and then limped slightly to the doorway. By the time he reached the door, the soreness had loosened up enough for him to walk normally. "Shit, I'm getting old."

  Down the hall and to the right was Dee's room. She had lived there for four years now, and Alexander had watched her grow from a child to the terror she was today. He tapped lightly at her door a few times.

  "Princess, can I come in?"

  "Come in, Dad," she said. Dee was ready for bed and sitting up against the headboard, reading. Moore looked at the book with some interest. The cover of it had popular science drawings of modern military mecha and weapons.

  "Some light reading, baby?"

  "Uh, no. I'm just educating myself on all the mecha that I've seen." Deanna set the book down and looked up at her father. "Dad?"

  "What, baby?"

  "I'm not a baby, Dad."

  "I know, princess. But you'll always be my baby." Moore smiled.

  "Uh, Dad." Dee frowned at him the way kids do when they reach that age where they don't want to be called a baby.

  "What do you need? Are you okay?

  "Oh, sure. I wanted to ask you about the future. Do you think you will win the election?"

  "It looks like it. Is that what's bothering you?"

  "No. I was just wanting to tell you that I want to be like you when I grow up." Dee looked up at him seriously.

  "Oh? You think you want to be president of the United States?" he asked her proudly.

  "No, Dad. Yuck, politics is gross." Dee made a sour face.

  "Then I don't understand what you mean." Alexander shrugged his shoulders, holding his hands palms-up.

  "I want to be a marine."

  "Well, what do you expect?" Sehera looked at Alexander. "She has watched you running around in e-suits fighting off tanks with your bare hands since she was really little. You're her hero."

  "Yeah?" Alexander's chest swelled a bit.

  "Yeah. And mine too." Sehera leaned against him and the two of them sank into the couch under the weight of their lives. "You never did tell me what Hardin gave you."

  "Oh that," Moore laughed. "You'll never believe this, but our clever Mrs. Amaka Chi was making deals with some DOE scientists to leak information to the public in a way that she could use to set me up. She thought of it all by herself, too."

  "Really?"

  "Of course not. Several of the DNC and the Indies were in on it, and the Tau Ceti Commission was nothing but a bunch of witch hunters, bound and determined to find a witch. And when they didn't find one, well, they manufactured one."

  "How did Hardin know this?" Sehera raised an eyebrow, more interested in the story now.

  "He was part of it," Alexander replied.

  "Why'd he help out, then?"

  "He says it's for a trade on some earmarks in his district, big earmarks. But you know that can't be all." Moore frowned and hugged his wife to him closer.

  "Yeah. He's a puppet. He's working some greater plan angle that he has no idea about. It's his master that has the agenda."

  "Which reminds me, I have a meeting in the Oval Office in thirty minutes." Those meetings in the Oval Office in the middle of the night were the ones he never liked.

  "Good luck." Sehera kissed him slowly while hugging him tight to her. "Watch your back."

  "Right." Moore sighed and sat quietly holding his wife for the next few minutes and trying not to think about anything in particular. That was hard to do.

  Alexander closed the door behind him and then toggled the switch to lower the blinds on the other side of the office. He locked the door's manual bolt and then keyed the electronic lock.

  Abigail, sweep the room for transmitters.

  We're clean, sir.

  Set up the jamming fields.

  They're on.
Nobody will be eavesdropping on you.

  Good. Unlock my desk.

  Yes, sir. Abigail transmitted the encrypted symbol sequence to unlock the president's desk. A faint click and turning of a mechanism could be heard, and then the middle drawer of his desk slid open about a centimeter.

  Alexander sat down at his desk, plopping tiredly into his chair. The legs of the chair barked against the floor, as his weight pushed it backward. He reached to the lower right-hand drawer of his desk and slid it open. He pulled out two glasses and a bottle of Maker's Mark that he kept there for certain stressful occasions. This was one of those. He filled one of the tumblers about three fingers deep and then swigged hard at the liquor.

  Then he reached back into the drawer and pulled out a small lockbox. Abigail cycled the lock on it, and the top opened like a jewelery box. Inside it was only one small, oval object with a green button on the underside of it. He set the object on the floor and then depressed the green button.

  Moore swiveled his chair around to relax and stare out of the one- way blinds over the window of the Oval Office for a second or two. He filled both glasses this time and continued to stare out the window, but his moment of relaxation was interrupted by a faint, crackling hiss sound that was coming from behind him, followed by a short burst of white light. Without turning to see the cause, President Moore sighed again and then put on a fake smile—an M-space teleportation, directly to the Oval Office.

  "You shouldn't be here, Elle; someone could be watching." He scanned around the office nervously. Abigail was good and had assured him that they were safe, but someday, some group of AICs would marry and build an even smarter one than she was. He couldn't be too careful.

  "Relax, Alexander, you've got the dampening field on. Nobody will see or hear a thing. If they do, I'll take care of it." Ahmi was wearing her mask as usual. She slipped it over her face and then set it down on Moore's desk. Without asking, she picked up the drink and began taking long draws from it. "I like what you've done with my office."

  "Right."

  "I see you managed to escape an election disaster," the Separatist leader said, and plopped down onto the president's sofa.

  "Yes, I did. It was just an overzealous congresswoman from Nigeria trying to make a name for herself. We all have skeletons, you know, and the lovely Mrs. Amaka Chi didn't want hers to go public. Especially since it would have ruined the Dems for years."

  "So I suppose Hardin gave you the information you needed?" Again Ahmi drank from her tumbler, this time emptying it.

  "I knew it was you behind that." Moore despised the murdering terrorist even if she had been Sienna Madira. In his mind, she couldn't still be that great person. But he had discovered thirty years before that her plan was too embedded to buck with a frontal assault. He had to play along and bide his time. "What was the deal with Luna City and Disney World for Christ's sake?" Moore asked.

  "I had an election to win. If the people of the system saw their beloved Magic Kingdom, the place they grew up fantasizing about, threatened by crazed terrorists, they would turn their attention from their daily pop culture long enough to watch a stalwart hero bounce in and save the day. I knew I could count on my marine. But I hadn't counted on you blowing up my ship before it hit Luna. That was clever. And I don't recall any plans to attack my Oort Cloud facility."

  "I had an election to win," Moore said, dryly.

  "My way would have assured us that Luna City didn't vote against you."

  "My way did assure that Luna City would vote for me." Moore offered her another drink, but she declined. He topped his tumbler off again.

  "Tell my daughter that her father is dead," Ahmi said out of the blue. There appeared to be a twinge of sadness to her voice. But Moore couldn't be certain.

  "What happened?"

  "He betrayed me. So, I shot him between the eyes with a railpistol."

  "Sehera will be sad to hear that." Alexander gulped. She had said it so nonchalantly.

  "It was the only logical solution. How is my granddaughter?"

  Safe, no thanks to you, you crazy bitch, he thought.

  Amen.

  "She wants to be a marine."

  "Ha. The apple didn't fall far, did it, son?"

  "No," he said. I'm not your fucking son, he thought.

  "Well, kiss her for me. Maybe one day I'll get to meet her."

  Not if I have anything to say about it.

  Me either. Too bad you can't just kill her now.

  We've talked about that, Abigail.

  I know, sir. It would destabilize the Separatists' union beyond recovery. I'm the one who did the simulations. I recall.

  Patience. Her day will come.

  "So, our plans for Tau Ceti haven't been compromised?" President Moore said, hoping to hurry this meeting along.

  "No, darling." Elle stood and patted Alexander on the head like an elder family member would a child.

  "Sehera's gonna want to know what you did with her father's body." Moore had met Sehera's father once while he was in the POW camp during the Martian Desert Campaigns, but that didn't count as meeting him as much as it did wanting to rip his fucking throat out. But he was his wife's father, nonetheless.

  "I spread his ashes over Madira Valley on the planet Ares. Poor Scotty, I'll miss him dearly." She picked her mask up from the president's desk and slid it over her head, pulling her long, black hair up through the hole in the back of it, tying it into a ponytail.

  "I'll let her know."

  "Be prepared, Alexander. You got away with your heroics this time. And you can keep the base in the Oort. I have other means of getting here now."

  "Yes, about that. How did you teleport a ship forward without a quantum connected platform on this end?"

  "We all have our secrets, Alexander. You have yours. I have mine. Heroics are good and will win elections, but . . ." She paused and poked Alexander in the chest with her finger. "You be careful how you interact with my plans. The last person to fuck with my plans just had his ashes spread over a rain forest. Family connections will only get you so far." She smiled and retracted her gloved finger and then depressed a sequence of buttons on her wristband, activating the QMT projector snap-back algorithm. Then the Separatist tyrant and once-great president vanished with a crackling hiss and a flash of light.

  "Goddamn, that bitch is crazy." He snatched up the oval device and shut off the quantum membrane beacon and then stowed it away with his Maker's Mark, but not before he took another swig from the bottle.

  Abigail? Moore wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat down.

  Yes, Mr. President?

  Don't ever let me get that fucking crazy.

  Not a chance, Mr. President. Somebody has to stop her.

  You're goddamned right we do.

  Epilogue

  "In the largest unprecedented landslide election since the third term of President Sienna Madira, we can now project as of nine twenty-three PM Eastern Standard Time on November 3, 2388, that Alexander Moore has maintained his grip . . . ."

  THE END

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