The Trilisk Revolution (Parker Interstellar Travels)

by McCloskey, Michael

  The Bismarck had been assigned to protect a core world delegation ship carrying important leaders to Earth. Admiral Sager did not think much of the assignment, but it was better than performing endless drills around Sol. At least the Bismarck finally got to leave Earth. As one of the most powerful new battleships made since the alien threat had come to light, it was kept close to home. Though the Seeker had been an exploration vessel, it had possessed powerful weapons. Yet the aliens had apparently dispatched it easily. That terrified Earth. Seeker’s destruction had started a huge build up across all the Terran held worlds.

  “The Marco Polo has detranslated,” a helm officer reported on the command channel. The officer was not physically present. Admiral Sager did not inquire as to the whereabouts of the man. Anyone in navigation, or for that matter in any area of command, could perform their duty from anywhere on the ship.

  Admiral Sager flipped up a nav display in his personal view. Their delegation ship had flipped from tachyonic particles into the sublight universe. Thus, Bismarck had left them way behind.

  “Drop out and compute a rendezvous translation,” Sager ordered. “Send them a t-packet and let them know we’re coming.”

  The Bismarck’s gravity spinners reduced power enough for the battleship to detranslate. Once in normal space, several virtual alarms immediately activated.

  “What the hell?” Sager said. Comments from other officers mimicked his own surprise. Officers all over the ship stopped whatever they were doing and furiously looked through panes of data in their PVs.

  “The gravity spinners are dropping lower than we told them to,” someone said.

  “We have contacts on the tactical,” another officer rattled off excitedly. “Two… two absolutely huge contacts!”

  “Battlestations,” Sager snapped. “Defense status five.”

  “Defense status five,” echoed Raigel, the Bismarck’s tactical combat AI.

  The top defense status call caused many things to happen all over the ship. Point defense weapons charged up, EM pods prepared to mitigate incoming energy, and weapons locked onto nearby contacts on the tactical. Raigel took command of large portions of the power output of the ship, using it to begin erratic maneuvers.

  Sager looked at the contacts. They were alien ships. They had to be. Their size was scary. Even larger than alien ships had been in the virtual drills they had conducted.

  This is real, he had to remind himself. The situation was like so many that had come up in virtual training since the alien threat had appeared. Except the situation was even more dire than some of their doomsday scenarios. And this is it. We’re dead.

  “Raigel,” Sager addressed his combat AI. “You’re authorized to do whatever it takes. If we can’t win, we have to warn Earth.”

  “Understood,” Raigel responded. The voice sounded synthetic as required by UN law, just as the name of an AI had to include the sequence “ai”. Core world citizens demanded that it be obvious when they were dealing with an artificial mind.

  “Communications penetration: zero,” reported Raigel. “We cannot contact the Marco Polo, either. Enemy ships register on visual wavelengths only.”

  “Visual only? How is that possible?”

  “They demonstrate we can see them only because they allow it,” Raigel surmised. “It is an intimidation tactic.”

  “Can we fight our way out?” asked Sager’s second, Captain Narron. Sager saw Narron had joined him on the deck. The captain hurried over to his side.

  “Weapons will be ineffectual,” Raigel said. “More analysis is required, but I believe this is checkmate.”

  Narron leaned forward. “I think Raigel has been compromised.”

  “Raigel, explain,” Sager said.

  “Many of our systems are under heavy enemy influence, including the gravity spinners and our power plants,” Raigel reported. “The objects we detect on visual wavelengths are most likely not where they appear to be. If our weapons do even fire, they will be firing off target.”

  The most powerful battleship ever made, and we’re defeated before even firing a shot.

  “If it’s not real, then their size and appearance can be faked, too,” Narron said. “Maybe the enemy ships aren’t large at all. Maybe there’s only one.”

  “Distract them,” Sager said. “Target our energy weapons at the most likely locations for enemies. Launch missiles and put them on standby patrols. Launch all our courier ships with warning messages, have them translate to FTL. Maybe…”

  “We’re receiving a transmission most likely from the aliens. Continue with your orders?”

  “Wait,” Sager said.

  “They know our protocols, too?” Narron asked.

  “Affirmative. Routing the channel through to you,” Raigel said.

  A woman’s face appeared on the screen. She was attractive, though with a scar across her left eye socket and an obviously artificial eye.

  There’s no reason to have a scar and such a gaudy eye. She wants us to see that for some reason, Sager thought. Another intimidation tactic? Seems kind of juvenile.

  “I’m sorry for disabling your ships. Earth is under threat,” she said. She pursed her lips, took a breath, and continued. “I’m going to lay it out for you straight. We have a fleet of alien ships and we’re headed for Earth. But we’re not the force that destroyed Seeker. We’re here to remove an alien influence from the top echelons of Earth’s government. We’ve chosen to isolate you because we want to win over your support. Or at the very least, prepare you to take over when we leave. Earth will be leaderless as a result of our action.”

  “The person portrayed is a good facsimile of Telisa Relachik, the child of Captain Relachik of the Seeker,” Raigel said on the officer channel.

  “The kid of Relachik? Sick joke. These aliens are twisted,” said Narron.

  Sager looked at the channel from the aliens. It was set up for two way communication.

  “Show yourselves. Release my spinners, and we will negotiate with you,” Sager said on the channel.

  “As I said. I have to isolate you. I can’t let the aliens know I’m coming. I don’t expect you to understand or believe me now.”

  “What have you done with Marco Polo?”

  “It will be joining you shortly,” the woman said. “I suggest you move that delegation aboard Bismarck, Admiral Sager. Just in case things get really ugly. The survivability of the delegation should improve on that battleship. These core world politicians will be useful in lending weight to your claim to power under martial law when we leave.”

  Sager shook his head. It was all too much to believe.

  They could just destroy us if they wanted. Could it be real? They know who I am.

  The woman stared at them in silence for a moment more. “I have evidence to offer you,” she finished. “I’ll arrange for its delivery. I want you to get looking at it right away, and I know you’ll fear a hack. So, I’m going to disarm your point defenses now just to show you that I can.”

  “Point defenses have deactivated,” Raigel said.

  “I don’t need to hack you. I can set any bit in any system on the ship from here,” she said. “So do Earth a favor and take a look at my evidence, think about my plan, and make plans of your own. Earth will be leaderless within the next few days. The Bismarck will be an important part of keeping things together.”

  The channel closed.

  “We have received a large data package,” Raigel said. “The Marco Polo has detranslated within ten thousand kilometers of our position.”

  “Raigel, figure out how to detect them. Send the package over to Daimyo for analysis,” Sager ordered, trading glum looks with Captain Narron.

  Chapter 5

  Caden had just finished a hard workout with a training android. He sat breathing deeply on a Jiu Jitsu mat, feeling the new abrasions and bruises scattered over his body. He would never trade in all his real workouts for virtual ones. Even though he could only try out the most dangerous thing
s in the VRs, he was training for real action now. Besides, the endorphin rush was priceless. There were pills for that, but what good would they be when he was fighting for his life on some alien planet?

  “Caden,” Telisa sent him.

  “Here,” he said.

  “Important meeting. We have something new cooking,” Telisa said. She was all business. She had not cracked a smile since losing Magnus.

  “On my way,” he said. Caden hopped into a shower tube for ten seconds to clean up, then tossed on a change of clothes. Being in a hurry, he headed out with a shock of wet hair, wearing only a pair of loose trousers and a short sleeve shirt. The shirt did not change colors like a colorweave, but neither would it fall apart if he had to dive and roll or climb down a cliff.

  Siobhan intercepted him on the way to the meeting. Her eyes flickered down, taking in his mussed appearance.

  She’s checking me out!

  He smiled at her.

  “Hi,” she said. She smiled at him for one second, then looked away.

  “Hey. Do you know what’s up?”

  “Nope. Just been training,” Siobhan said.

  Caden nodded. Siobhan acted a bit odd sometimes. She often smiled and chatted, but then she seemed to want to bug out quickly.

  She’s from a different place with different customs, he reminded himself. Still, he had the most in common with Siobhan. He remembered all the fun they had had jumping around in the Blackvine habitat. Caden and Siobhan were the youngest, and like Telisa, they were adventurous.

  “We could go jump around a sim of that habitat after the meeting,” Caden said suddenly. “You know—the Blackvine houses in the sky.”

  “What! Oh! Yes, that would be cool,” Siobhan said.

  “Okay then, it’s a date.”

  Siobhan’s eyes bulged.

  Oh. She’s freaked out because I said ‘date’.

  “Not a date date I mean. Oh, we don’t have to if you don’t wanna,” Caden said.

  “I want to,” she said quickly.

  They walked into big room on the Clacker for the FTF. Caden saw both of the Cilreths, Maxsym, and Imanol.

  “Wunderkind and Fast’n’Frightening,” Imanol said. “Nice of you to drop by. You guys having a little FTF of your own? Or maybe I should say BTB?”

  Body to body. As in, incarnate.

  Caden let the remark slide right off. Telisa and Cilreth would see he may be younger than Imanol, but he acted more professionally day in and day out. Siobhan decided to strike back.

  “You could have had some incarnate time with me too, Imanol,” Siobhan said sweetly. “Oh that’s right. You’re afraid of me.”

  “No, that was GI Jane.”

  The remark caught Caden off guard. Leave it to Imanol to mention Arakaki. Caden knew if she had been at the meeting, she would ignore it. So Caden did too.

  Okay, I officially hate this jerk. He doesn’t know where to draw the line.

  “As you may be aware,” Telisa started in, “We’re going to stop the Trilisks that rule Earth. I have a group preparing to take over after we’re done. We just go in and find the Trilisks. We’ll take them out with minimum engagement with the Space Force.”

  Caden’s eyebrows lifted. Imanol looked equally surprised, though Maxsym and Siobhan remained placid.

  A new channel opened with a data stream describing a space habitat. Caden looked it over in his PV. Skyhold. He had heard of it. It was supposed to be a really important space habitat.

  “We’ve discovered that Skyhold is home to over eighty percent of our targets,” Telisa said. She let that sink in while everyone looked Skyhold over.

  “It’s tempting to assume that all the Trilisks are together there,” Siobhan said. “Maybe the others are just Trilisk sympathizers, or… just power hungry people who don’t know who their allies really are?”

  “The same thought occurred to me,” Telisa said. “But we can’t assume it. I don’t know enough about Trilisks to know if they would prefer to segregate themselves, even in human form.”

  “Maybe they take other forms there, and no one is around to see,” a Cilreth said.

  “Then one of us goes ahead to figure out what’s going on,” Caden said.

  “The security is insane there,” the other Cilreth said. “The habitat itself carries as much armament as a Space Force cruiser. Internally, there’s a strong robotic security force controlled by multiple AIs.”

  “Sounds like a target for Clacker’s main weapons,” Caden said. “Take them all out in one shot.”

  “Maybe. We have to verify they’re actually Trilisks,” Telisa said.

  “There are others on that station. Servants,” a Cilreth said.

  “Slaves!” Siobhan said. “You can bet on it. Those ‘servants’ are slaves.”

  She said something about her family being slaves, Caden thought.

  “I’ll go in and scan them,” Caden said. “I can let you know, get out, and we can let them have it! If there’s a mix of targets and noncombatants there, then we need a more complicated plan B.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I have another mission for you, Caden,” Telisa said.

  Really? She already has a mission for me?

  “What?” Caden said.

  “Space Force Command,” Telisa said.

  What!

  No one dared speak for a moment. Everyone stared at him.

  “There’s a Trilisk…?” he asked.

  “Three people on the list. Two men and one woman. Admirals. They’re likely Trilisks in my opinion. If you were setting up the Space Force as a tool to do your bidding, this is where you would be.”

  Caden bristled at the thought.

  Wow. I’ve got to weed them out! We can’t have aliens in control of the Space Force!

  “Security would be tight,” Caden said slowly. But he thought something else.

  If I got rid of those aliens, they’d have to let me in. I could still be an officer.

  “It’s not lost on me that you planned to join the Space Force, Caden,” Telisa said. “Here’s your chance to be their hero. Though they won’t know that until we’re done. We have to figure out how to get you, or at least an attendant sphere in there and scan those people. If they’re Trilisks, we have to take them out. And we won’t be able to use the orbital weapons or the Clacker to do it. We can’t open fire on Space Force Command. We have a lot of planning to do. I’ll be coordinating with all of you separately. We’re taking a hiatus from our group training, because we all need to start working simulations of our individual missions.”

  Telisa sent Caden a copy of the Orwell Papers. Caden had already read them. They were famous. The Space Force had studied them carefully and put several safeguards into place to ensure the plan could never succeed. Telisa seemed to know that, but she considered the information valuable since it gave clues about who the Trilisks might be.

  The meeting broke up and Caden headed off with Siobhan.

  “I guess we can’t do the jumping around right now,” he said. “We have a lot of sims to set up. I want to do a lot of practice runs around a virtual command center.”

  Siobhan nodded. “I have work to do, too.”

  They split up to head to their own areas of the ship. Caden had his own room set up like a modern strongpoint, with robots guarding the door and a laser emitter embedded in the ceiling.

  Maybe I can take a break later and hang with Siobhan.

  ***

  Siobhan felt a bit depressed as she left Caden after the meeting. But she knew there were huge things ahead of them. How could she be feeding her silly crush on Caden when they needed to be saving Earth?

  And I need to get my revenge.

  Siobhan started to investigate the Spero family’s current whereabouts on Earth. They were fairly famous, and so there was a lot of information to sift through. She finally zeroed in on Kagan in particular, and found out he was considered a recluse who spent most of his time on a tropical island compound owned by SSFC.
>
  Siobhan made queries about the compound. She wanted the blueprints so she could formulate some plan of attack.

  Theoretically such a query could be flagged and tracked, but Shiny had assured the PIT team that he knew how to obfuscate the trail of their interactions with the Terran networks. It was the only way Telisa could stay online without being tracked by the UNSF.

  Her investigation found a lot of material. She copied it to her link. She brought up the building plans of the estate.

  “How accurate are these, I wonder?” she asked herself quietly. “Total fabrication? That’s how I’d do it if I were a paranoid immortal. Put a death trap where my bedroom is supposed to be.”

  Siobhan looked through the construction records. She spotted another large contract with a security company.

  That’s a lot of money. No doubt they’re making extensive security modifications to the house. All paid for by the company, of course.

  Siobhan started to get angry thinking about it. Kagan had been living in luxury while her kind suffered. He had used the labor of company employees, and even slaves, to increase his own wealth.

  “You may have all your money, and your scary company, but I have more at my disposal than you do now,” she muttered. But she did not have enough information to know what modifications had been made. The floor plan itself could even be altered. Or an entire new floor could have been put in for that kind of money. She frowned and leaned back on her bed, frustrated.

  “Cilreth?”

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “One of the Trilisks is living in this heavily modified estate,” Siobhan sent Cilreth a pointer. “I want to know—”

  “You want to know what it looks like today.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can do it,” Cilreth said. “What’s in it for me?”

  What? She never said that before.

  “Well, uhm,” she stuttered.

  The safety of Earth? Was she from Earth again?